Word: janacek
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...Corsaro's production, slides and movie films projected upon shifting, oddly shaped screens clarify the former identities of the heroine. Thus handled, Janacek's propulsive overture is accompanied by a surrealistic visual nightmare of running figures, time travel, characters that melt from one person to another, and a Gestapo-like chauffeur who symbolizes death. During the opera's action, the films subside into ghostly suggestions of thoughts and memories, some of them unabashed recollections of the heroine's erotic past. When the secret-of-life document is burned, the entire stage ignites into a holocaust...
...Sadler's Wells Opera. Another devoted fan is Walter Susskind of the St. Louis Symphony, who remembers Janáček from his student days in Prague. He compares Janáček's originality with that of America's Charles Ives. Like Ives, Janacek was a weird, lonely figure who owed little to his musical ancestors and had no true descendants. His method of composing was slapdash and, to would-be performers, sometimes unintelligible. Says Mackerras: "He never really knew his craft. He had an absolutely lackadaisical approach to the details, but a strict and passionate...
...FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10:30 p.m.) The American premiere of Czech Composer Leos Janacek's opera based on the Dostoevsky novel From the House of the Dead features John Reardon, Robert Rounseville, David Lloyd and Frederick Jagel...
...STRING QUARTET IN F MAJOR, OPUS 96 (London). Chamber music has a reputation for being cerebral, but Dvořák makes it heady. His "American" quartet, written in 1893 on a summer visit to Spillville, Iowa, is filled with song and catchy rhythm. The excellent Janacek Quartet plays it brightly, as well as the earlier, more conventional Quartet in D Minor dedicated to Brahms...
...Bartok in the history of chamber music, the Kohon Quartet of New York University is undertaking the first recording of all 15 of his string quartets. More interesting than Volume I. this package includes the three last quartets. Though the Kohon does not have the singing tone of the Janacek ensemble, the players know Dvořák in all his moods and are eloquent spokesmen...