From the House of the Dead

Aside from a handful of performances of Jenůfa, the works of Leoš Janáček were largely absent from the Met stage until the 1990s—when his Káťa Kabanová and The Makropulos Case had their long-awaited company premieres. In 2009, a fourth of the composer’s masterpieces, From the House of the Dead, arrived at the Met, in an austere yet gripping staging by visionary director Patrice Chéreau. Based on a novel by Dostoevsky, the opera follows a group of inmates in a Siberian prison camp and is a true ensemble piece. This radio broadcast, recorded a month after the production’s premiere, features a number of standout performances from the principal cast, which includes tenors Štefan Margita and Kurt Streit, baritone Peter Mattei, and bass-baritone Willard White. And on the podium, acclaimed conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen leads one of the early-20th century’s most electrifying scores.