NODO 2024 is recent history

Publikováno: 2.7.2024

In the last five days of June, the 7th Biennial Festival of New Opera and Musical Theatre – NODO / New Opera Days Ostrava took place in Ostrava, in both buildings of the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre, Tatran Hall and the Puppet Theatre. In an extremely short time, thanks to the high commitment and maximum effort of our and international production teams and about 150 performers, including technical staff, a total of seven opera performances, exclusively in world or Czech premieres, were staged in Ostrava over ten days. The NODO Festival offered a very varied view of the shape of opera in the 21st century and created a space for artistic response by artists of the young and middle generation to a time that intensely affects us all. The only continuous showcase of contemporary musical theatre in the Czech Republic is organized by the Ostrava Centre for New Music (OCNH) in symbiosis with the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre (NDM).

"At NODO one often hears a remark made with admiration – how 'extraordinary' our performances and productions are. This is not the case. We consider it normal to perform new works and operas by mostly young composers! What is not normal, and has no historical precedent, is a repertoire exclusively focused on the past, one and the same thing over and over again, which is what we encounter in the great opera houses and symphony orchestras."

Petr Kotík, June 29, 2024 

Each performance of this year's Biennial demonstrated a completely different world of content and music. But one thing NODO had in common was the top performances of our and foreign performers and the ability to make the most of the minimum time that the stage managers, musicians and actors had to stage the opera productions in Ostrava. The director and Slovenian artist Rocc described the NODO festival as an OPERA LABORATORY.

On June 26, the festival opened with a new collaboration with the Neue Oper Wien, whose leading figure is conductor Walter Kobéra. He also conducted the festival's "opera orchestra", which since the opening of NODO has been the international Ostravská banda. The joint title was the famous work Passion (2006-07) by French composer Pascal Dusapin, a chamber drama of passion inspired by Monteverdi's opera Orfeo. Singers Melis Demiray and Wolfgang Resch, together with the madrigal PPCM Vocal Ensemble Graz, performed in a new direction by Ursula Horner. The production travels to Vienna in the autumn.

One of the most awaited performances was the announced world premiere of František Chaloupka's The Sell-Out (Opera about Organization) (1981). The composer is also the author of the libretto of the opera, which he composed for the festival. The approximately 100-minute performance (June 27) was directed by Rocc (also via Tomáš Hlaváček's live cinema). The critically acclaimed futuristic performance was superbly staged by baritone Felix Heuser, sopranos Markéta Drabina Schaffartzik and Zuzana Smrčková and tenor Martin Javorský. The demanding parts, including acting actions, were performed by the choir Canticum Ostrava, prepared by Yurii Galatenko. Orchestra Ostravská banda, reinforced by members of ONO – Ostrava New Orchestra, was led by French conductor Bruno Ferrandis.

On the third day (June 28) the festival headed to alternative spaces. The Tatran Basketball Hall with its high, visually striking ceiling attracted the attention of an artist tandem from Israel: Impact, an immersive opera for soprano, stuntwoman, riggers, orchestra, mixed choir and live electronics, was subtitled Inner Journey Out of Darkness, and the authors took a fresh look at corporeality through it. Not only the main characters – soprano Katsiaryna Zhynhiarouskaya and stuntwoman Helga Wretman – also gave admirable acting performances in the high summer temperatures. The audience was disarmed by the relentless force of gravity and the performers' efforts to defy it, paralleling the falls and rises in human relationships.

That evening, on Friday June 28, we saw a performance at the Puppet Theatre that was full of wit, exaggeration and education: Russolo’s Bitter End. The director Petr Odo Macháček from the Kámen Theatre in Prague brought to Ostrava a team that created a playful "tribute" to the author of the manifesto The Art of Noise (1913) based on a libretto by the philosopher Petr Rezek and his fictional story about the Italian painter and composer Luigi Russolo. The original intonarumori - "noisemakers", manned by Luciano Chessa, Anna Clementi and Werner Durand, played a big role. The angelic voice of Pavla Radostová arched over the noises of everyday life, Petr Ferenc as Giacomo the cat conducted philosophical reflections with his master Russolo (Miroslav Paulíček), and Lucie Zachovalová playfully set the pace of the household.

An evening with two operas also took place the following day on June 29. The Jiří Myron Theatre was taken over by the ethereal ambient opera Ephemeral Pulse by New York composer Ian Davis (1989). The large orchestra was led by Petr Kotík, the choir Canticum Ostrava was excellently prepared by Yurii Galatenko. Emily Dickinson's verses about eternity, which consists of today's days, flowed freely through the work. Composer Haštal Hapka (1997) offered a completely different world with his opera with a crime plot and a terrorist act based on a true story Once Everybody’s Here. The Prague team, led by director Vilma Bořkovec and dramaturge Magdalena Stojowska, also brought young jazz musicians to NODO, the Ostravská banda String Quartet played in the orchestra pit, and the young conductor Patrik Kako sovereignly took charge of the musical staging. And the actors on stage, with the singing role of Alžběta Vomáčková, were united in asking: Who is the victim, who is the criminal and who is the hero? 

The festival closed at the Antonín Dvořák Theatre with the full-length opera The Little Lives by Irish composer Ann Cleare (1983), which had its world premiere in 2022 at the Munich Biennale. The opera was newly staged by Jiří Nekvasil and David Bazika. In the arias and monologues of five characters enclosed by a "manipulator" in a Scottish park (a fantastic cast of singers led by Christopher Robson), we followed the plight of our lives and of Europe as a whole. The opera orchestra was represented by eight top Ostravská banda players and live electronics by Mikuláš Mrva and Otakar Mlčoch. Conductor Bruno Ferrandis had a perfect overview of the musically demanding performance.

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