Orchestral Suites from the Operas, Vol. 3 Naxos 8.570706
- Composer: Leos Janacek
- Arranger: Peter Breiner
- Conductor: Peter Breiner
- Orchestra: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
With this disc Naxos completes its acclaimed recordings of Peter Breiner’s powerful and evocative orchestral suites from Janáček’s operas. In very different ways, The Cunning Little Vixen and From the House of the Dead both reflect on love and loneliness, life and death, good, evil and the human condition, with some of the composer’s most effective music. Warmly welcomed as ‘refreshingly new’, Vol. 1: Jenůfa, The Excursions of Mr Brouček and Vol. 2: Kát’a Kabanová and The Makropulos Affair are also available.
Orchestral Suites from the Operas, Vol. 3 Review
The suite usually performed from Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, arranged by Talich in the 1930s, is a 17-minute diptych using material from Act 1 only (ie up to the point of the Vixen’s bloody escape from the Forester’s yard) and is based on a reorchestration Talich commissioned that was easier to play. Breiner’s returns to the original and runs to nearly 40 minutes. Breiner’s first two movements follow the same basic trajectory as Talich’s but the suite then takes off with the Vixen’s courtship and eventual marriage to the Fox over the next two spans. The fifth movement deals with the Vixen’s desperate hunt to feed her cubs and eventual death at the hand of the poacher but the brief finale (“Vixen is Running”) lights up the orchestra with its paean to nature.
Hope of a different kind underlies From the House of the Dead, Janáček’s final opera. Here Breiner has started with the Overture (related to the music of the Violin Concerto) and proceeds once again through six highly coloured movements running to over 35 minutes. The hard edge of Janáček’s scoring, devoid of the vocal elements, becomes even more telling.
Breiner himself conducts, securing accomplished playing from the New Zealanders, and Naxos’s sound is rich with depth. Guy Rickards – Gramophone