Philip Glass, In the Penal Colony (2000)

So this looks to have been a French webcast (there are French subtitles, at any rate) of a Czech production. Premiere Opera may be a super-gray-market thing, but we're talking about Art here! Quibble me no quibbles about legality! There would have been absolutely no other way to see it, and there are too few Glass operas available in video form anyway. SO.

As you have no doubt gathered from the title, this is an opera based on Kafka's short story. It takes place in a penal colony (whodathunkit?) where a European visitor is inspecting things. An officer explains to him how the place works, and in particular this punishment device that carves the names of prisoners' crimes into their flesh and then kills them in the space of twelve hours. However, this device, invented by the previous commander of the colony, has lately fallen out of favor. The officer wants the visitor to speak in favor of it, but he won't, so he decides to release the current prisoner and use it on himself, only it malfunctions and kills him immediately, denying him whatever edification the twelve-hour thing would've brought. The visitor leaves.

Do you think Glass is the most recognizable composer there is? I mean, Mozart may be better than Salieri, but are you confident that, faced with pieces by each, you could correctly identify which is which one hundred percent of the time? I'm sure not. But I've never heard anyone that really sounds like Glass. Maybe that's my parochialism. But anyway, this is very definitely our ol' pal Philip, and while I think you could argue that his music is most suited to impressionistic operas like Einstein, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten, it also works with the sinister atmosphere of this one.

There are only two singing roles here, the officer and the visitor. Apparently some productions feature Kafka himself in a spoken role, but not this one. I guess the prisoner is a screaming role. Jiří Hájek and Miroslav Kopp as the singers are fine, both very forcefully projecting, although it must be said, they both on occasion pronounce English words in a non-standard way that makes them a bit difficult to understand. The production is a bit perplexing, featuring random dancers are women with a sort of barbie-doll look there for...unclear reasons. But I suppose it's not a very "normal" opera in any event.

Did I like it? Yeah I liked it. Whatever issues I had with it are probably more down to the story itself than anything about its execution here. It's certainly a bit chilly, and you come out of it thinking, okay. But and? Still, it's memorable. It may be the least of the Glass operas I've seen, but it is still not at all bad.