How well do you know your Janáček opera? If the answer is “not much” or even “not at all”, you are missing out: the Moravian master combined impossibly beautiful music with some of the most dramatic, hard-hitting plots in the operatic repertoire. And nowhere could be more appropriate to see them than Moravia, the composer’s birthplace, whose capital Brno hosts the biennial Janáček Brno International Theatre and Music Festival – it runs from October 7th to 18th this year (with a pair of preview performances in September).
The festival opens and closes with two of Janáček’s most gut-wrenching works, both performed at the largest of the city’s venues, the 1,055 seat Janáček Theatre. The opener, Káťa Kabanová, tells of an unfaithful wife trapped in a loveless marriage who throws herself into the river: Robert Carsen’s production, first seen at Opera Vlaanderen, covers the whole stage in water. Jenůfa, which closes the festival, also portrays suicide, but in the face of an intractable moral dilemma – having said which, the opera ends with the promise of redemption for the survivors. Both heroines are sung by one of Czech’s top sopranos, Pavla Vykopalová, described by Bachtrack’s Gilles Lesur as “poetic” and having “clear, beautiful timbre and legato”.
A third Janáček opera, From the House of the Dead, marks the festival’s mid point. Based on Dostoyevsky’s autobiographical novel of his experiences in a Siberian prison camp, it’s being performed by Oper Nürnberg in a production by Calixto Bieito. The festival’s opera evenings also include a double bill of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Schoenberg’s Erwartung, in collaboration with Gothenburg Opera and starring Swedish mezzo Katarina Karnéus, a former winner of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition. Those with a taste for rarely performed modern works should go for The Fall of the Antichrist a dystopic opera by Viktor Ullmann (who also, when incarcerated in Terezin, composed the surrealist opera The Emperor of Atlantis). An intriguing counterpart is Steve Reich’s multimedia opera The Cave, chosen by the festival because both Janáček and Reich worked with the rendering of natural speech rhythms into music. The Mahen Theatre, where The Cave is being performed, opened in 1882: it was the first theatre in the world to be lit electrically, under a contract with the Edison Electric Light Company. The theatre also hosts the festival’s one children’s opera: Ravel’s L'Enfant et les sortilèges.
Apart from opera, the Janáček Brno Festival is an excellent chance to sample the composer’s output, which covered most musical forms of his time. Most of the concerts present Janáček’s music in the context of other composers and many include pieces that aren’t performed all that often outside Czech, such as his ballad for orchestra The Fiddler’s Child, which will be played by the Prague Philharmonia (set against Bartók’s Music for strings, percussion and celesta), or selections of his folk-based choral songs (set against Martinů). One of the biggest draws should be the October 8th concert featuring Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake, performing The Diary of one who Disappeared and a selection from the marvellous piano cycle On an Overgrown Path, set against Dvořák’s Gypsy Songs.