CRITICS aren’t sup posed to use the word “perfect.” It sounds excessive and insincere, because, after all, nothing in life or art is absolute.
But when confronted with a production of such overwhelming excellence as “From the House of the Dead” at the Met, the urge to use the P-word is just about irresistible.
As the curtain slowly fell Thursday night after the hushed finale of the company’s premiere of Janacek’s last opera, applause surged to roars of “bravo” for the uniformly superb troupe of soloists, chorus and actors.
The opera, based on Dostoyevsky’s novel of the same name, is set among the inmates of a Siberian prison camp. During the single 100-minute act, they work, fight, bond, perform comic skits on visitor’s day — and some of them talk about the crimes that landed them in this “House of the Dead.”
Depressing, right? And yet it’s not, thanks to the deeply empathetic music of Janacek, whose motto in this work was “In every creature, a spark of the divine.”
In his Met debut, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen deftly shaped this intricate patchwork of percussion rhythms, stabbing woodwind solos and delicate folk-like melodies to humanize even the most brutal of the thugs.
To single out members of this ensemble for praise is as irrelevant as parsing the brush strokes of Picasso’s “Guernica.” That said, worthy of accolades are Kurt Streit, deftly bending his pristine tenor to portray the half-cracked Skuratov, and Peter Mattei, whose honeyed baritone revealed a core of beauty at the heart of the murderer Shishkov’s rambling confession scene.
The hero of the night was legendary French director Patrice Chéreau, who coaxed performances of fascinating unpredictability and unself-conscious honesty from the huge cast, including extras glimpsed for only a few seconds.
Even a startling mid-show scene change — spectacular enough to make Franco Zeffirelli gasp — turns out to be no mere effect, but rather an ingenious, organic way of portraying the drudgery of prison life.
If such a thing as perfection in opera is possible, in this “House of the Dead,” the Met achieves it.