It was relatively late in life that the Moravian composer Janáček won more than local recognition. He made his early career in the capital of his native province, Brno, coupling an interest in regional folk-music with a study of speech intonations, echoed in his instrumental as well as vocal writing. His opera Jenůfa was first staged in Brno in 1904, but it was the performance in Prague in 1915 that brought the work of the composer a much wider public. The seven operas that followed have formed a very idiosyncratic part of current operatic repertoire, culminating in From the House of the Dead, completed in 1928, the year of Janáček’s death, and based on the novel by Dostoevsky.

Orchestral Music

The best known of Janáč...