A 20th Century Opera Collection - Martinu - Řecké pašije (The Greek Passion) - Jirí Belohlávek

Řecké pašije (The Greek Passion), Opera in 4 acts after Kzantzakis' "Christ Recrucified"

Priest Grigoris: Ludek Vele
Patriarcheas: Ales Hendrych
Manolios: Tomas Cerny
Priest Fotis: Roman Janal
Katerina: Maida Hundeling

Orchestra of the National Theatre, Prague
Jiri Belohlavek

Live Rec. 2006, Premiere - 13 April 2006, the National Theatre, Prague

From Martinu.cz:

The new production of the Greek Passion will be the first time this opera has been staged in the National Theatre’s historical building. This is one of Bohuslav Martinu’s most famous and most beautiful operas. The musical study in this production has been undertaken by Jiri Belohlavek, the director is Jiri Nekvasil and the stage designer Daniel Dvorak.
The original libretto of the Greek Passion is in English and it is based on a translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel Christ Recrucified, according to which Martinu wrote the opera and with whose author he carefully consulted. The National Theatre will perform the opera in a new Czech translation by the musicologist Ales Brezina. It had become apparent that the previous Czech translation by Eva Bezdekova had a number of problematic aspects and inadequacies in comparison with the composer’s original English libretto. For example, different words often appeared in places which Martinu had musically accented, leading to the entire sound of the work being distorted.

The Czechoslovak premiere of the second version of the Greek Passion took place in Brno on 3. 3. 1962. Eva Bezdekova’s translation had already met with a significantly critical response, unlike her translations of Martinu’s other operas. The repressive attitude of the communist regime towards the church was clearly the reason for the watering down of the religious context in the first translation of the Greek Passions. This self-censorship significantly impoverished the opera’s spiritual plane, in which the dominant parts are sung by two priests and the main characters identify themselves with biblical characters and their attitudes. The new translation preserves the proximity of the libretto to the biblical original and it does so not only in the scenes with the two priests, where this context is apparent at first glance, but also in the scenes from the everyday lives of the other characters where biblical scenes and situations are often paraphrased.




Tracklist:

CD1

1-5: Act I
6-10: Act II

CD2

1-5: Act III
6-11: Act IV

Pass: leverkuhn

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