Janáček: From the House of the Dead

"In every creature, there is a spark of God": perhaps only Leos Janacek could have taken Dostoyevsky's unsparing memoir of life in a Siberian labour camp and turned it into an affirmation of the human spirit. From the House of the Dead is a hymn to life, an opera without heroes that sets out to ennoble humanity itself, and it takes a very special team of artists to lay bare its raw, profoundly compassionate soul. Frank Castorf's Munich production does exactly that; a bold and insightful updating given wings by a superb ensemble cast and the impassioned conducting of Simone Young.