Rare and well done. (Viewpoint).

Chevron Texaco's January broadcasts include two all-time hits, Carmen and Die Fledermaus, and two operas that aren't so popular as they deserve to be. The story may be the problem with Leos Janacek's Jenufa, which is receiving a new Met production this month: it deals with the grim subject of child murder and a crabbed life in a provincial Czech village. It has had a distinguished career at the Met, from its introduction in 1924 (in German) with a cast that included Maria Jeritza and Margarete Matzenauer, through its return to the repertory (in English) a half century later with Teresa Kubiak, Jon Vickers and Astrid Varnay. In 1992, two great singing actresses--Leonie Rysanek and Anja Silja--shared the part of Kostelnicka in an unforgettable revival, and this year, the incandescent Karita Mattila takes on the part of the heroine for the first time at the Met. We greet this new production by interviewing two vital young artists to whom it has been entrusted, conductor Vladimir Jurowski and director Olivier Tambosi. Martin Bernheimer's talk with Jurowski (p. 32) reveals a young, exceptionally savvy maestro who says he won't perform Beethoven's symphonies until he has something new to say, and who is content to let an older hand introduce Tristan und Isolde to Glyndebourne, where he is music director. Last season, Jurowski's conducting of Eugene Onegin at the Met showed both the ennui of Russian country life and the feckless jealousy of the opera's aristocratic hero. I am impatient to hear Jurowski display the darker passions of Janacek's Czech villagers. In William V. Madison's profile of Tambosi (p. 36), we meet a cosmopolite with astounding credentials, both educational and professional. Just one example: at age thirty-nine, he's directed Jenufa at three of the world's leading houses.

The second relative rarity to be broadcast this month is Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites, which reappears in a 1977 John Dexter production widely regarded as a classic. The opera is a deeply religious work about which many people feel passionately, whether or not their religious sentiments match Poulenc's. Father Owen Lee, the redoubtable classicist and panelist on ...