Word: janacek
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Czech Composer Leos Janacek was 40 when he started his masterpiece, the opera Jenufa. He was close to 50 when he finished the work and past 60 before he found an audience that could appreciate it. In its only U.S. production-during the 1924-25 Metropolitan Opera season, three years before Janacek's death-Jenufa (pronounced Yen-uffa) was roundly panned. In recent years, European opera houses have been looking at Jenufa with fresh admiration, and last week Chicago's Lyric Opera followed suit, gave the work its first U.S. performance in 35 years...
Audiences have generally been disturbed by the sordidness of Jenufa's libretto (it hinges on the drowning of an illegitimate child), by the opera's harshly dissonant score, and its generally unmelodic vocal line. Composer Janacek derived many of his melodies from the inflections of common speech, caught them by prowling around with a notebook, jotting down overheard phrases and sentences in approximate musical notation. The result is that the orchestra becomes part of the drama. In last week's performance (which marked the U.S. debut of opulent-voiced Dutch Soprano Gré Brouwenstijn) Jenufa proved...
...some 50 members of the audience, who left during the first act, Jenufa was apparently still too bleak to take. But those who stayed let loose with a volley of bravos for the cast and brilliant Yugoslav Conductor Lovro Von Matacic. It looked as if Composer Janacek, in his slow and tortuous way, might at last be winning the audience that had so long eluded...
...piano literature for one hand can pretty well be numbered on the fingers of two. Scriabin, Brahms. Ravel and Strauss all took a shot at it, along with such moderns as Benjamin Britten and Leos Janacek.* The rest of the left-hand repertory is pretty much what the trade calls "knitting music." But a platoon of composers in Holland last week was hard at work on some new and surprisingly engaging left-hand pieces to be played by a recent recruit to the field: 45-year-old Dutch Pianist Cor de Groot...
Composer Suchon, who also worked on the libretto, fleshed the bare bones of his plot with some moving psychological insights. The libretto was admirably supplemented by Suchon's muscular score, which reminded the enthusiastic audience of the music of Czechoslovakia's Leos (Jenufa) Janacek and Hungary's Bela Bartok. Strongly rhythmic, it combined rich Slovakian folk flavor with pungently powerful orchestration. In Katrena's lament over her fate, strikingly sung by Soprano Anny Schlemm, and in Ondrej's affecting admission of guilt, Suchon provided crowd-rousing vocal high points that might well place The Vortex...