NODO 2022 / New Opera Days Ostrava
June 25, 2022
19:00 | Jiří Myron Theater
Salvatore Sciarrino: SUPERFLUMINA (2010) / Czech premiere
One-act opera for three soloists, orchestra and choir
Music and libretto: Salvatore Sciarrino
Conductor: Lilianna Krych
Director: Pia Partum
Stage, costume and light design: Magdalena Maciejewska
Choreography: Agnieszka Dmochowska
Video: Franek Wardyński
Performers:
Anna Radziejewska, mezzosoprano (Woman)
Jan Jakub Monowid, countertenor (Young Man/Distant Voice)
Artur Janda, baritone (Passer-by/Policeman)
Ostravská banda
Canticum Ostrava
Jurij Galatenko, choirmaster
Czech premiere, 90'
In Italian language with Czech and English subtitles
This production is supported by Italian Institute of Culture in Prague.
Salvatore Sciarrino’s Superflumina, based on a novel by Elizabeth Smart, is set in a large train station – a site of collective flux and roaming. The audience is part of the crowd, but at the same time lonely. The station is a place of intense noise, and a gathering place for the homeless. The protagonist of Superflumina is a woman, most likely homeless, who gets lost and suffers through a painful night. She speaks in riddles; no one wants to hear her out and no one understands her. The audience only finds out mere fragments of her stories and encounters. The composer’s muse, mezzosoprano Anna Radziejewska, who excelled two years ago at NODO in Sciarrino’s Luci mie traditrici, will take up the major role of Woman who finds herself lost and lonely amidst the hurrying crowd. Sciarrino comments on his opera: “Loneliness is nothing but the surface of abandonment. It causes deep scars which are invisible and whose traces have already disappeared: And yet each of us can break out into such a cry at any moment.”
Salvatore Sciarrino (1947) started composing when he was twelve as a self-taught person and held his first public concert in 1962. He found his original musical language — based on an enriched palette of instrumental sounds, extreme dynamic changes, mostly very soft sounds at the edge of silence with suggestive repetitions of several simple characteristic elements — very early. He has written many compositions, and for many years he has been among the biggest “stars” of contemporary music. In addition to authoring most of his operas’ librettos, he has written a rich production of articles, essays, and texts of various genres, some of which have been chosen and collected in Carte da suono (2001). Particularly important is his interdisciplinary book about musical form, Le figure della musica. Da Beethoven a oggi (1998). Ostrava Days and NODO / New Opera Days Ostrava have presented numerous compositions by Sciarrino, including his operas Infinito nero, La porta della legge, and Luci mie traditrici.
June 26, 2022
19:00 | Antonín Dvořák Theater
Matouš Hejl: OPERA IBSEN / GHOSTS (2021–22) / world premiere of version for orchestra
Opera in three acts
Festival commission
Music: Matouš Hejl
Libretto: Lucie Trmíková
Conductor: Bruno Ferrandis
Director: Jan Nebeský
Stage design: Jan Nebeský, Petra Vlachynská
Costume design: Petra Vlachynská
Performers:
Lucie Trmíková (Mrs. Helen Alving)
Miloslav König (Osvald Alving)
Igor Chmela (Pastor Manders)
Petr Jeništa (Jakub Engstrand)
Magdalena Malá (Regina Engstrand)
Jan Mikušek, cimbalom
Petr Tichý, bass guitar
Jiří Genrt, tuba
Antonín Procházka, percussion
Jan Gajdica, guitar
Ostravská banda
World premiere, 120'
In Czech language with Czech and English subtitles
The opera was created and will be presented as part of "Play Ibsen! - a Theatre Play with an attendant programme", supported by a grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway from 2014-2021 EEA Funds.
140 years ago, Henrik Ibsen completed the play Ghosts. The theaters in Kristiania, Stockholm and Copenhagen refused to stage the play. The world premiere took place in Chicago. The theme of the play is lies, fear, conventions, and hypocrisy. The issue of euthanasia was also scandalous at the time (and it remains to be an explosive theme to this day). Director Jan Nebeský staged the play 30 years ago as his first production of Ibsen, and at the Ibsen Festival in Oslo, the production caused a great stir with its radical interpretation. After seven more Ibsen plays, Jan Nebeský returns to the Ghosts to radically shift them into the genre. As an opera, Ibsen will bring new and unexpected possibilities in the interpretation and perception of this supremely naturalistic play. The author of the music will be Matouš Hejl, the author of the libretto is Lucie Trmíková.
The works of Matouš Hejl span classical music, experimental electronic music, film, theater and installation art. In 2018, he made the shortlist of Czech Philharmonic’s composition contest and had his Crossings performed by the ensemble. In the same year, he received the Trochu nižší C4 (Slightly Flat C4) award for contemporary music; he also holds the 2016 Karl Krautgartner Award for jazz orchestra composition. His soundtracks to Ztraceni v Mnichově (Lost in Munich) and Staříci (Old-Timers) earned him a nomination for Czech Lion Awards. His collaborations with Orchestra Berg include immersive composition Prolínám, stmívám (Crossfading, Fading Out), performed in 2019 and 2020. Born in 1989 in Prague, Hejl studied composition at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music, The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and Berklee College of Music, Boston.
June 27, 2022
18:00–00:00 | Jiří Myron Theatre
Petr Kotík: MANY MANY WOMEN (1975–78) / world premiere of staged version
Vocal-instrumental composition
Music: Petr Kotík
Libretto: Gertrude Stein
Director, stage design: Jo Fabian
Performers:
S.E.M. Ensemble
Singers:
Jen Wu, soprano
Ana Caseiro, soprano
Padraic Costello, countertenor
Felix Heuser, tenor
Harald Hieronymus Hein, bass/baritone
Nicholas Hay, bass
Instrumentalists:
Petr Kotík, Malgorzata Hlawsa, flutes
Sam Jones, Adam Richter, trumpets
William Lang, Jen Baker, trombones
World premiere of staged version, 360'
In English language
Many Many Women by Petr Kotik is a composition of extended duration. It is based on Gertrude Stein’s novella by the same name. Stein's text is part of her book G.M.P. - Gertrude, Matisse, Picasso, which was published in 1910 in Paris and re-published by Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press in 1972. In 1971, Kotik began composing for voice as a result of his close collaboration with the composer and singer Julius Eastman. From the first piece he composed for Eastman, Kotik was using the writings of Gertrude Stein. Many Many Women (1975–78) is the culmination of his series of Stein-related works. Composed for voices and instruments, it includes two sopranos, a counter-tenor, tenor, baritone, bass, 2 flutes, 2 trumpets, and 2 trombones. The twelve musicians perform continuously for six hours (there is also a possibility for a shorter version for a smaller ensemble). The duration of the complete piece is the result of Kotik's use of the whole text of the novella.
Kotik's music is based on a concept of a variable "situation" without a clear beginning or ending. The music does not follow a narrative form and does not have a dramatic character. The idea of creating a continuous, non-dramatic "situation" emerged in the early 1950s in works by John Cage, Morton Feldman and others. Instead of a narrative progression – known in music as the Sonata form - there is a continuous, almost Beckettian "situation" that although changing, remains stable and consistent. This idea is elucidated in Feldman’s comments on the libretto Samuel Beckett provided for his opera Neither (1997): "…there's something peculiar about the text. I can't catch it. Finally, I see that every line is really the same thought said in another way. And yet the continuity acts as if something else is happening. Nothing else is happening. What you're doing, in an almost Proustian way, is getting deeper and deeper saturated into the thought."
The score of Many Many Women consists of 173 sections across 378 pages. The sections are distributed among all the performers, who shape the piece during the performance, improvising their entrances, creating a musical flow of unpredictable configurations. The poetic nature of Stein’s text suggests images that could lead to a musical theater. Despite its open form, Many Many Women is traditionally and exactly notated. The performance at the NODO festival will be the first staged performance.
Although, Petr Kotik undertook rigorous musical training at the Prague Conservatory, and studying composition – first privately with Jan Rychlík in Prague and later in Vienna at the Akademie für Musik with Karl Schieske and Hans Jelinek, as a composer, Kotik regards himself as self-taught. Rychlík has been a source of inspiration and admiration for Kotik throughout his life (similar to Philip Glass's admiration for Nadia Boulanger). Rychlík's work and ideas were far ahead of his time. In the late 1950s, he began to work with phase music based on African drumming, similar to Steve Reich more than a decade later. Rychlík's early beginnings as a jazz player as well as his scholarly research into music practice led him to understand and appreciate the significance of improvisation, almost half a century before it became part of the avant-garde. It is possible that the unconventional openness of Rychlík, together with the writings of Cage, which Kotik discovered at the age of eighteen, may have influenced his way of thinking at the very early stage.
June 28, 2022
19:00 | Antonín Dvořák Theatre
Lucie Páchová: APPROXIMATE (2021–22) / world premiere
Experimental staged opera
Festival commission
Music, directing: Lucie Páchová
Stage and costume design: Jana Nunčič
Sound design, directing: Theresa Schrezenmeir
Light design, directing: Jan Neugebauer
Visulas: Klaas Boelen
Performers:
Lucie Páchová (voice, objects)
Jana Vondrů (voice, objects)
Anežka Nováková (percussion, voice)
Kristýna Švihálková (percussion, voice)
World premiere, 35'
In Czech language
Getting close, drifting apart. In space, sound, light, meaning. Getting close to the edge of perception, moving away from the threshold of rationality. Getting close to fulfilling expectations only to topple them the next moment. How personal, how intimate is it to hear a human voice? How close can the voice get and to what extent can we perceive its message? Voice as the conventional carrier of words and meaning, of melody, of emotion. What are the different expectations scripted voices should meet, and what if they don’t meet them precisely? Sourceless human voice, disembodied voice taking the form of sound, light, object or manifesting itself directly in the loudspeaker, radio, telephone, these newly borrowed bodies. Approximate is a chamber opera that plays around with our accustomed perceptions, subverting our usual expectations both at the level of sensory perception and the level of plot mechanics. The creators use both complex and utterly simple techniques to interrogate the extent of possible discrepancies between perception and thinking. The libretto is grounded in philosophical phenomenology and cognitive psychology, but also handbooks on hypnosis or concentration training. The voice enters into a rhythmically precise dialogue not just with instruments, but also light, movement, projected images, objects or space. The non-hierarchical creative process brings together prominent stage artists and musicians from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Germany.
During her Multimedia Composition studies at JAMU’s Faculty of Music, Lucie Páchová focused on audiovisual projects at the intersection of theater, film and sound installation (Z alb; ZeZásuvek; experimental opera Orisstrea). Her PhD in composition, which she is currently finishing at the same faculty, revolves around live-controlled improvisation. In 2011, she founded Talaqpo, a quintet with which she performs her compositions inspired by visits to Asia and Africa. She also composes for jazz orchestras (Concept Art Orchestra, JazzDock Orchestra) or chamber ensembles (arará, Love_me, Dunami Ensemble, Paliome, Jungle Debris), often taking up vocalist duties. She’s collaborated with theaters and ensembles including Continuo, Prague Improvisation Orchestra or Stratocluster; her further collaborators include Ivan Palacký, Peter Graham, David Danel, Gaspard Beck or Elia Moretti. Her residencies at Bratislava’s A4 Space for Contemporary Culture and Žilina’s New Synagogue resulted in Imaginary Garden and Voidsphere, respectively – sound installations interrogating the physical experience of sound, voice and space. Other residency programs have taken her to the US (OneBeat), Bulgaria or Poland. Her recent work includes Voissage, a vocal composition for Czech Radio’s Radioateliér series.
June 28, 2022
20:00 | Antonín Dvořák Theatre
Judith Berkson: PARTIAL MEMORIES (2022) / world premiere
One-act opera for 4 soloists and chamber ensemble
Festival commission
Music: Judith Berkson
Libretto: Judith Berkson, texts from Talmud
Conductor: Bruno Ferrandis
Director: Viktorie Vášová
Stage and costume design: Natálie Rajnišová
Light design: Zewll
Performers:
Mikaela Elson, soprano
Elliot Menard, mezzosoprano
Judith Berkson, alt
Vojtěch Šembera, baritone
Ostravská banda, international chamber orchestra
World premiere, 40'
In English language with Czech and English subtitles
As time moves farther from our past, and history obscures what we've left behind, we are left with Partial Memories. The opera follows the composer Judith and four singers as they travel through a series of past events that have been changed, compromised, forgotten, or erased. The opera is about coming to terms with partial remembrances where we don’t even know what is missing. For Judith these include the creative contributions left out of history by mothers and women. Works of art that were forgotten but nevertheless existed and resonated in the world. These creative acts are perceived by the characters onstage through their own voices. Sounds from the past are collected, remembered, and re-sounded in the present. A sculpture is built onstage to identify their memory.
The title Partial Memories also refers to the harmonic partials of the overtone series. Every note that is sounded is a composite of a series of ever higher overtones that become imperceptible to us. Many of these natural overtones lie between the notes of what we are accustomed to, they are microtonal. Yet these harmonic overtones exist, have existed and will continue to exist in our physical world. We are forever perceiving them whether we can hear them or not, they are there. All shades of pitch are resonating in a virtual continuum. The opera is about hearing these resonances. Similarly, the past, of which we have only partial memories, continues to resonate, whether we acknowledge the source, understand it, or erase it completely.
Composer-Performer Judith Berkson works with microtonal voice and acoustic instruments to explore resonances, soundwave beating patterns and tunings in the body and how these suggest themes of perception, time and memory. She has collaborated with the Kronos Quartet, City Opera, Laurie Anderson, Yarn/Wire and others on a range of work from eletroacoustic interpretations of Schubert lieder, to transcriptions of historic cantorial recordings, opera, noise and free improvisation. She has premiered vocal works by Chaya Czernowin, Enno Poppe, Mick Barr, Joe Maneri, Rick Burkhardt, Gerard Pape, Julia Wentz and Aleksandra Vrebalov and has presented solo works at the Picasso Museum Malaga, Le Poisson Rouge and National Sawdust. The New York Times described her album Oylam (ECM Records) as “Standards and Schubert and liturgical music, swing and chilly silences, a beautiful Satie-like piece to open and close the record. I can’t get enough of it”. Her first opera The Vienna Rite is based on the collaboration between composer Franz Schubert and the Viennese cantor Salomon Sulzer during the 19th century. Her current work focuses on microtonal writing for acoustic instruments and voice.
June 28, 2022
21:00 | Antonín Dvořák Theatre
James Layton: SAUDADE (2021–22) / world premiere
Chamber opera in seven stills
Festival commission
Music: James Layton
Libretto: Jack Burnham
Conductor: Bruno Ferrandis
Director: Marek David
Stage design: Adéla Szturcová
Light design: Filip Horn
Performers:
Markéta Schaffartzik, soprano
Vojtěch Šembera, baritone
Patryk Zamojski, dancer
Ostravská banda
World premiere, 25'
In English language with Czech and English subtitles
Found at the intersection between desire and expression, two halves, separated by death, now wind through the years enacting a spectral dance. There is a reckoning with the inexorable persistence of memory, and the inability to break a compulsive and damning cycle of inarticulacy. The natural flow of yearning proves vulnerable to disruption. The years have made language thin and brittle. So we scratch our story onto the surface of ice, at the point of departure. A future is possible, but may not be permissible. A negotiation of sorts occurs, one that anxiously balances on the tip of the needle deep within the heart of all crystalline winter dreams.
James Layton is a composer, musician and artist based in London, UK. His work often explores non-climatic forms, which slowly unfold and focus on the juxtaposition of progression and stasis. His use of patterns, permutations and repetition aims to draw listeners into the music, while exploring ideas of time and memory. James is founder and curator of the Into the Ocean Series, an integrated record label and concert series showcasing experimental new music, primarily by emerging composers, and is also part of RGMS: a curated collective of artists focusing on experimental release who produce a wide array of exploratory musics, ranging from lush soundscapes to near barren field recordings, and controlled chaos to meditative canopies. James studied his undergraduate degree in Composition at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance under Sam Hayden, Paul Newland, Stephen Montague and Gwyn Pritchard, and Viola with Richard Crabtree.
June 29, 2022
20:30 | Ski Centre Opálená
Miroslav Tóth: NULANUS (2021) / world premiere of live performance
Documentary opera for a ski-slope in summer and clones
Music and libretto: Miroslav Tóth
Director: Pasi Mäkelä
Dramaturgy: Michaela Rosová
Costume design: Diana Strausz
Light design: Jan Hustál
Production: Ivo Dobrovodský, Kristína Rigerová
Performers:
Members of Ostravská banda
Hugwaldové – Nela H. Kornetová, Pasi Mäkelä, Emese Kovács
World premiere, 60'
In Slovak language
Nulanus is the second part from the Shadow series of the creative duo Miroslav Tóth - Michaela Rosová. The first part was about the demise of the dramatic opera in the form of The Man in the Space Suit. It was a performance situated in theater and site specific interiors and exteriors. Nulanus abandons this principle of working in a traditional space. He takes the audience to the ski slope in the summer, creates the concept of a sound walk, which he intervenes in with ambisonous music reproductions, trombones hidden somewhere in the trees, a drone circling overhead and performers singing into a walkie-talkie (they represent a single man' clone). This time, audience is advised to wear sturdy shoes. As he walks, Nulanus plays with reality and finally the sun sets.
Miroslav Tóth (1981) is a composer and saxophonist hailing from Bratislava. He finished his PhD studies at HAMU in Prague under Michal Rataj and his master studies at VŠMU in Bratislava under Vladimír Godár (for the first three years he studied under Jevgenij Iršaj). He was mentored by Ilja Zelenka at the beginning of his compositional studies. He is also a graduate of musicology at the Comenius University in Bratislava. Tóth is the author of the one-act opera Mystery of a Bar, the opera A Miraculous Bar for Clerks in Public Institutions, three video operas – A Tooth for a Tooth,Eye for an Eye and The Pole, and an unfinished opera Outpark. His composition The Quartet of Tentacles Reaching Out was performed by Kronos Quartet. Furthermore, he wrote the composition Theory of Absolute Sadness for soprano and orchestra, the cabaret suite BallOnAir and Requiem for Mafioso for a cappella choir and contra tenor. In 2018, he won a Radio_Head award for his electroacoustic composition Kyberpunkomša (Cyber-Punk-Ceremony). He is a member of the bands Shibuya Motors, Thisnis, Frozen Wigwam, and Funeral Marching Band. As a saxophonist, singer and soundpainting conductor, he focuses on free improvisation, graphic scores that overlap with the visual sphere, and on works with some degree of openness. He has composed the music to several feature films and regularly collaborates with Ivan Ostrochovský and Robert Kirchhoff.
June 30, 2022
19:00 | Triple Hall Karolina
Luigi Nono: PROMETEO. TRAGEDIA DELL'ASCOLTO (1981–84, rev. 1985) / Czech premiere
Staged work for vocal and instrumental soloists, mixed choir, four instrumental groups and live electronics
Music: Luigi Nono
Libretto: based on the myth of Prometeo; texts by Aischylos, Sofokles, Walter Benjamin, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and others revised by Massimo Cacciari
Conductors: Jiří Rožeň, Petr Kotík
Choirmaster: Jurij Galatenko
Staged realization: Jiří Nekvasil, David Bazika
Live electronics: Conservatorio di Musica di Vicenza “Arrigo Pedrollo” / GRAIM Studio:
Luca Richelli (sound direction)
Lorenzo Pagliei (1st assistant)
Nicola Di Paolo (2nd assistant)
Performers:
Jen Wu, soprano
Ana Caseiro, soprano
Padraic Costello, countertenor (alto)
Justina Vaitkute, counteralto
Felix Heuser, tenor
Martin Gyimesi, tenor
Micol Pambieri, narrator
Sergio Basile, narrator
ONO – Ostrava New Orchestra
Ostravská banda
Canticum Ostrava
Czech premiere, 135'
In Italian language with Czech and English subtitles
In cooperation with Conservatorio di Musica di Vicenza "Arrigo Pedrollo", Italy
This production is supported by Italian Institute of Culture in Prague.
Considered unanimously as one of the peaks of post-war opera, Prometeo was the acme of Nono’s research, begun towards the end of the 1970s, about the sense of making music and the very aim of art, in conjunction with the reflective withdrawal of its expressive instruments and musical contents after his combative years of “commitment”. Prometeo is a work that refuses to relate, to represent, to compromise the listening with scenography precisely because it was born with a will to explore and stimulate a deeper ability of listening, that was supposed to be, actually, an invitation not to accept any preconceived reality. The libretto itself does not aim simply to narrate the story of Prometheus, but to evoke it through a dense net of quotations in three languages within autonomous segments that refer back to ancient theatre and quantified, roaming perception (Prologue, interludes, stasima, islands). On this basis, Nono set up a score of unprecedented, off-putting, movable and encircling sounds, often bordering on silence, manipuulated by live electronics, so as to make the space tangible by eliminating the direct and conventional relationship with the drama, crushed – as in a profound reconsideration of Renaissance polyphony – between reciting voices, choir and solo singers, whose texts are never pronounced or sung in a conventional way. It is therefore a drama of sounds, neither of actors nor of characters: the “tragedy of listening” should be understood as the ability to seize what happens in a unique, unrepeatable moment, which exhorts us each time to overcome our limited knowledge without taking anything for granted. Nono’s Prometheus is not the hero who gives humankind fire and practical knowledge, that is technology. He is, instead, the one who doesn’t accept anything as a fact, what is conforming or imposed, who is in a continuous, unsuccessful search for something deep and, each time, new and elusive.
Luigi Nono (1924–1990) is ranked among the most remarkable composers of the 20th Century in all phases of his career. He managed to give his serial composition method an exceptional strength of expression; his compositional message was influenced by his fight against oppression. In his works, he managed to connect political themes with avant-garde music and highly poetic forms. His compositions were always characterized by a great sonic imagination. Nono’s later work (after 1980) appears to rebel against the tense dramatic nature of earlier compositions. New, meditative elements appear, and the music “purges itself” in a special way: it gains a utopian, visionary character, focusing more on the eloquence of the sound itself. In fact, all of these characteristics were present in Nono’s work from the very beginning; only in this phase do they take on a central role – the opera Prometeo is the best example of this. This piece presents the theatrical form in an unusual way, reducing plot and the stage action and focusing only on sound.
