From the House of the Dead & Glagolitic Mass

Can the darkest moments of life also lift our souls? Drawing on his own experience in a Siberian prison in the company of misfits, murderers and theives, Dostoevsky was inspired to write his novel Notes from a Dead House, telling his brother at the time: ‘Believe me, there were among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often gave me great joy to find gold under a rough exterior.’ In Janáček’s hands, Dostoevsky’s inspiration and the raw material drawn from an appalling world of incarceration find an even more powerful form of expression in his last opera, From the House of the Dead. Unfettered by conventional story-telling, Janáček wrote his own libretto, freely weaving together a series of stories of everyday prison life and of the fates of individual convicts.

Cast

Gianluca Zampieri

Luka (Filka Morozov)

Roman Hoza

Alexandr Petrovič Gorjančikov

Jarmila Balážová

Aljeja / Young Tatar

Peter Berger

Skuratov

Pavol Kubáň

Šiškov

Jan Šťáva

Prison Governor

Zbigniew Malak

Tall Prisoner / Young Prisoner / Voice in Steppe / Prisoner 3

Lukáš Bařák

Short Prisoner / Prisoner 1 / Blacksmith / Čekunov

Eduard Martynyuk

Šapkin / Drunk Prisoner / Cheerful Prisoner

Vít Nosek

Prisoner with the Eagle / Prisoner 2 / Kedril / Čerevin

Petr Levíček

Elderly Prisoner

Tadeáš Hoza

Prisoner A / Don Juan / The Brahmin