The ‘great power of life’ in 40 minutes: Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass, a Hong Kong Arts Festival highlight
Czech composer’s work has unique qualities, says conductor Jaroslav Kyzlink, who’ll lead performances in the city of the religious work
After the first performance of Leos Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass, in December 1927 in the stadium concert hall in Brno a reviewer wrote that this was “a marvellous religious work of an old composer”.
Janacek was furious. “I am not old. And I am certainly not religious,” he retorted. He was 73 and had less than eight months to live when he wrote this mass, dying in August 1928 of pneumonia after a summer excursion to the Czech hills.
In the last decade of his life Janacek, in a fervour of unrequited love for a young woman, Kamila, had written the best things of his career, the works that would make him famous in his own lifetime, and keep music-lovers in awe, 90 years on.
And the Glagolitic Mass – a highlight of this year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival, performed by the Orchestra and Chorus of the Janacek Opera of the National Theatre Brno – is, of course, in almost every way religious.
