IT is not the most alluring of titles. But Dostoyevsky’s tales of four years in a Siberian prison camp provided Janacek with the inspiration for his last, and arguably most powerful, opera.
Acting as his own librettist, the composer poured his remaining energy into the piece, completing it just before his death in 1928.
This is not conventional opera. Rather than a full-blown plot, we have a series of vignettes of prison life, which partner and amplify Beethoven’s Fidelio, also on the menu this spring.
A wintry morning sees the arrival of an aristocratic convict, Goryanchikov. The Governor has him flogged, while other prisoners taunt and nurse an injured eagle. These two events provide a frame, since the new convict is released at the end, just as the eagle recovers and flies again.
In between, there are several strands. Goryanchikov teaches the boy Alyeya (a trouser role) to read, but the boy is later attacked and hurt. Skuratov regrets his wasted life: he murdered his ex-sweetheart’s new husband. Luka describes murdering another prison governor.
Meanwhile, a feast day is celebrated with a meal and a theatre-piece (based on Gogol) miming Don Juan’s last night.
Shishkov tells of murdering his wife after finding she loved another – who turns out to be Luka, who is now dying of TB.
John Fulljames’s stirring production sees the opera as an extended symphony - the orchestra’s role is critical throughout - lightened by vividly cinematic tableaux on stage. Many of the subtitles (although it is sung in a well-focused translation by Charles Mackerras and John Tyrrell) are to be found projected on to parts of the set in scrawly capitals, as if the convicts are writing their own story.
Dick Bird’s sets and costumes leave the rigours of the prison ungilded – grey, threatening, unforgiving – with occasional vistas of endless steppes beyond.
For all this greyness, we sense the human spirit winning through, epitomised by the eventual flight of the eagle. In a large cast, there are no true principals. But Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts as Luka, Alan Oke’s Skuratov, Richard Morrison’s Goryanchikov and, above all, Robert Hayward’s sterling Shishkov – delivered from halfway up a ladder, as if on a cross, with fellow-criminals similarly trapped – make powerful contributions. Claire Wild is an agile Alyeya.
Richard Farnes’s extraordinarily vivid orchestra and a male chorus that also pours out its soul make this a searing experience, quite unlike opera as we mainly know it.
Further performances tonight, May 12 and 14, then on tour. operanorth.co.uk
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