From the House of the Dead

With this new production, voted Europe's best opera staging for 2007, one of opera's great visionaries makes his Met debut. Patrice Chéreau, renowned for his legendary centennial Ring cycle at Bayreuth, directs Janácek's drama of human resilience inside a Russian prison. "The penal camp is a different society, parallel to ours, but there are many similarities between the two," Chéreau declares. "Power, relationships, humiliation, passion-all those things exist in both worlds." Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen also makes his Met debut, and Peter Mattei leads the ensemble cast.
A production of the Metropolitan Opera and the Wiener Festwochen, in co-production with Holland Festival, Amsterdam; the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence; and Teatro alla Scala, Milan.