JVA Vechta

In Germany the letters JVA stand for Justizvollzugsanstalt — a prison. The institution at Vechta, in Lower Saxony, is not a concert venue in any ordinary sense; like many German prisons it has an assembly hall in which services, ceremonies and occasional performances take place. Touring companies have from time to time brought opera in concert form inside such walls, to audiences who cannot leave at the interval. It is a quiet and genuinely old tradition of European musical life, and one rarely written down.