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Gala festival opening

premiere

Conductor: Marko Ivanović

Stage director: David Radok

Set Design: Zuzana Ježková, Ondřej Nekvasil

Costume Design: Zuzana Ježková

Lighting Design: Petr Kozumplík

Choirmaster: Pavel Koňárek

Dramaturgist: Pavel Petráněk

Assistant Conductor: Robert Kružík

Assistant Stage Director: Otakar Blaha, Barbora Hamalová

CAST:

Emilia Marty: Gitta-Maria Sjöberg

Albert Gregor: Aleš Briscein

Vítek, Kolenatý’s clerk: Petr Levíček

Kristina: Eva Štěrbová

Jaroslav Prus: Svatopluk Sem

Janek: Peter Račko

Dr Kolenatý, a lawyer: František Ďuriač

A Stage Technician: Jiří Klecker

A Cleaning Woman: Jitka Zerhauová

Hauk-Shendorf: Josef Škrobánek

A Maid: Jana Wallingerová

Janáček Opera Ensemble and Orchestra of the National Theatre Brno

Brno National Theatre

Co-production between The National Theatre Brno and Opera Gothenburg.

Janáček completed his seventh opera, The Makropulos Affair, in 1925, when he was 71. But why did he choose Čapek’s play, which at first sight appears so thematically different from all of Janáček’s other operas? It seems to have been from a need to reflect on a life nearing its end and the meaning of life and death. This can already be seen in The Cunning Little Vixen, where death goes hand in hand with birth. Janáček’s pantheistic outlook is obvious here: nature has its own order and, though it may appear cruel, it is the only conceivable and logical one. The Makropulos Affair examines what would happen if this order were artificially tampered with. For someone who has lived to be 300 years old, life becomes unbearable. Faith and the meaning of existence are lost. To outward appearances, such a person becomes a faultless personality, but inwardly they are transformed into a kind of monster. It would appear that the premiere of Čapek’s play arrived at precisely the right time and coincided with the composer’s own thoughts. The premiere of the opera took place at the Brno National Theatre in the City Theatre building (today’s Mahen Theatre) on December 26 1929 and met with great success. This was partly due to the excellent staging by the conductor František Neumann, the director Ota Zítek and Alexandra Čvanová in the lead role (who, incidentally, took on this role at only 29 years of age). What is it that continues to fascinate us about this opera today? No doubt there is its modernity and exclusive setting, where people use cars and telephones, but it also has the mystery and tension of a well-constructed detective story. However, its success is mainly due to the brilliance of Janáček’s music and his ability as a composer to perfectly combine words and music into one unique operatic whole.

Kantilena 02

BOHUSLAV MARTINŮ (1890–1959)

Primrose H 348

A New Hat   

Behind Our Farmyard

Complaint

Painted Wood

Midday

JOSEF BOHUSLAV FOERSTER (1859–1951)

Children’s Choruses op. 89

Forest Spring

Crocodile

Nut

KAREL REINER (1910–1979)

The Flowered Horse (selection from the cycle)

It begins with Adam
Potatoes and barometers
Ten commandments for young poets
The electric spell
The photographer
Goliath was a terrible master
The flowered horse

Brno Children’s Chorus

Valeria Maťašová – choirmaster

Pavel Wallinger – violin

Šárka Králová – piano

LEOŠ JANÁČEK (1854–1928)

Little Queens

We are carrying the maypole
The falcon flew away
We have a lame queen
Hurry, my little queen, hurry 
Who is the queen that the king has gained
Little onion
The gallant’s young wife
We’re riding to the mill
A beautiful, beautiful little queen is standing
Our queen
Our willows are turning green 

LEOŠ JANÁČEK (1854–1928)

Nursery Rhymes

Turnip was getting married

Nothing’s nicer than early spring

Mole is crawling

Karel rode to hell

Torn trousers

Franta from the knacker family plays the bass

Our dog, our dog

I’m preaching a sermon

The old woman was casting spells

Ho, ho, the cows are coming

My tiny little wife

The old woman’s crawling into the elder tree

The white goat’s picking pears

The surly German banged the pots

The goat lies on the hay

Vašek, shepherd boy, drummer-boy

Frantík, Frantík

The bear sat on the tree trunk

Kantiléna, the Youth and Children’s Choir at the Brno Philharmonic

Jakub Klecker – Choirmaster

Petr Pomkla – 1st flute, Kristina Vaculová – 2nd flute, Lukáš Daňhel – 1st clarinet, Stanislav Pavlíček – 2nd clarinet, Dušan Drápela – 1st bassoon, Jiří Jakubec – 2nd bassoon and contrabassoon, Michal Pokorný – double bass, Petr Hladík – ocarina and small drum, Jiří Hrubý –piano

Petr Levíček – tenor

Jan Šťáva – bass

Choral works have been important for a number of Czech composers. Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959) wrote dozens of songs and choruses, and in most of them he took his inspiration from folk poetry – for example, the New Chap-Book from 1942 or Sušil’s magical collection Songs on One Page and Songs on Two Pages from 1943 and 1944, which despite their diminutive size impress with their harmonic and rhythmic charge. In Nice in 1954 Martinů composed another popular chorus based on Moravian folk poetry, stylized as duets for soprano, alto, violin and piano, called Primrose. The impetus for these duets came from the composer and conductor Zdeňek Zouhar, who performed this opus with his female choir in 1955. It is well known that when Martinů was invited to write these choruses by Zouhar, he spontaneously replied: “I would be delighted to write some duets for you… Working with our folk texts always brings me pleasure”. Today Primrose is one of the jewels of the Czech choral repertoire, and it is also interesting that it forms a kind of counterweight to the composer’s monophonic songs and also a new variation on Dvořák’s Moravian Duets.

The songs and especially the choruses of Josef Bohuslav Foerster (1859–1951) are some of his most popular works. He inherited his love of choral song from his ancestors and he began his musical life as a choral singer (choir of the church of St Adalbert, Prague Hlahol). In his own choral works he initially borrowed greatly from Smetana and Dvořák, but as he continued to mature in his composition he was influenced by other developments and he set off in several directions – for example, using extreme positions (falsetto), wide dynamic contrasts and hitherto unknown inner dramatic tension, which left its imprint on every larger-scale choral creation. The choruses presented today are part of a five-part collection entitled Children’s Choruses op. 89. The accompanying texts were written by Josef Václav Sládek and Karel Toman.

Because of his Jewish origin and the times in which he lived, the life of the composer Karel Reiner (1910–1979) was far from easy… He wrote more than 280 smaller and larger, mainly instrumental pieces. A large part of his work was made up of incidental music for films, theatre and radio. At the same time he worked in musical education and journalism. He also has several choruses to his name, among which the foremost is the cycle The Flowered Horse – poems, games and rhymes to the words of Norbert Frýd from 1942.

There is a significant proportion of choral compositions among the work of Leoš Janáček (1854–1928). He himself was the choirmaster of several amateur choirs, but in the years 1879-88, for example, also of the Brno Beseda, where he attracted attention as an excellent and lively conductor. There he followed the footsteps of Křížkovský and led the society’s choir to great musical heights.

Choruses were the first of Janáček’s works on which he honed his compositional style. Among his most famous male choruses are Maryčka Magdónova, 70.000, and Halfar the schoolmaster from the start of the 20th century. Janáček wrote the cycle Little Queens with the subtitle Old Ritual Folk Dances with Songs in 1889 and it is made up of 10 folk songs and dances. Little Queens comes from a period when Leoš Janáček systematically and consciously drew on folk song, dance and poetry. Little Queens has its origin in the pagan era and is related to the summer solstice. These are ancient ceremonial dances with songs which were collected and compiled by František X. Bakeš in the late 19th century on the basis of work by the renowned collector František Sušil.

Janáček composed the Nursery Rhymes in 1925, originally for three mezzo-sopranos, clarinet and piano, and set only eight nursery rhymes to music. In 1926 the work was expanded into the form we know today. The cycle was created in 1926 to short verses for children which were published in the children’s supplement of the Lidové noviny newspaper and are among the greatest works from the Maestro’s last period. Janáček wanted to project some of Lada’s illustrations to go along with the Nursery Rhymes, but it was technically impossible at the time. It was not until the end of the 1940s that the director Eduard Hofman was able to animate Lada’s illustrations. However, he only worked on a selection of the Nursery Rhymes, so for the remaining parts the film was supplemented by static images

Pavel Petráněk

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Although Jenůfa represents the very beginning of the composer’s journey towards a modern and distinctive form of musical drama, it is his most frequently performed opera (a similar situation to that of Benjamin Britten and his early opera Peter Grimes). Work on Jenůfa placed great demands on Janáček. He found the subject matter for his opera in a play by the young writer Gabriela Preissová which was controversial in its day. The story of the tragic fate of a young woman which is brought about by the prejudices of the time was evidently in keeping with Janáček’s social conscience. In choosing Preissová’s play, however, he also chose a work of prose, which he was the very first composer to employ in an opera. Work on the composition took him a full nine years, starting in 1894. However, it was frequently interrupted because of his enormous workload at the schools where he taught. He completed the opera as his beloved daughter Olga was dying, at the beginning of 1903. The uncertainty associated with the new approach to composition, this tragic event in his personal life and the subsequent rejection of the opera by the Prague National Theatre placed a huge psychological strain on the composer. In the end the premiere was taken on by Brno and its Czech National Theatre. It took place in a now-defunct theatre building on Veveří Street on January 21, 1904 under the baton of C. M. Hrazdira. Although, in view of the limitations of its time, the staging was rather rudimentary, it enjoyed great success. Janáček then went on to rework the opera into its present form in 1906 and 1907. After the Prague (1916) and then Viennese premiere (1918) the work was taken up across the world and it remains one of the most frequently performed operas of the 20th century.

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Conductor: Marko Ivanović
Stage director: David Radok
Set Design: Zuzana Ježková,  Ondřej Nekvasil
Costume Design: Zuzana Ježková
Lighting Design: Petr Kozumplík
Choirmaster: Pavel Koňárek
Dramaturgist: Pavel Petráněk
Assistant Conductor: Robert Kružík
Assistant Stage Director: Otakar Blaha, Barbora Hamalová

CAST: Emilia Marty: Gitta-Maria Sjöberg Albert Gregor: Aleš Briscein Vítek, Kolenatý’s clerk: Petr Levíček Kristina: Eva Štěrbová Jaroslav Prus: Svatopluk Sem Janek: Peter Račko Dr Kolenatý, a lawyer: František Ďuriač A Stage Technician: Jiří Klecker A Cleaning Woman: Jitka Zerhauová Hauk-Shendorf: Josef Škrobánek A Maid: Jana Wallingerová Janáček Opera Ensemble and Orchestra of the National Theatre Brno

Co-production between The National Theatre Brno and Opera Gothenburg.

Janáček completed his seventh opera, The Makropulos Affair, in 1925, when he was 71. But why did he choose Čapek’s play, which at first sight appears so thematically different from all of Janáček’s other operas? It seems to have been from a need to reflect on a life nearing its end and the meaning of life and death. This can already be seen in The Cunning Little Vixen, where death goes hand in hand with birth. Janáček’s pantheistic outlook is obvious here: nature has its own order and, though it may appear cruel, it is the only conceivable and logical one. The Makropulos Affair examines what would happen if this order were artificially tampered with. For someone who has lived to be 300 years old, life becomes unbearable. Faith and the meaning of existence are lost. To outward appearances, such a person becomes a faultless personality, but inwardly they are transformed into a kind of monster. It would appear that the premiere of Čapek’s play arrived at precisely the right time and coincided with the composer’s own thoughts. The premiere of the opera took place at the Brno National Theatre in the City Theatre building (today’s Mahen Theatre) on December 26 1929 and met with great success. This was partly due to the excellent staging by the conductor František Neumann, the director Ota Zítek and Alexandra Čvanová in the lead role (who, incidentally, took on this role at only 29 years of age). What is it that continues to fascinate us about this opera today? No doubt there is its modernity and exclusive setting, where people use cars and telephones, but it also has the mystery and tension of a well-constructed detective story. However, its success is mainly due to the brilliance of Janáček’s music and his ability as a composer to perfectly combine words and music into one unique operatic whole.

Bystrouska_FOTO_Hana_Smejkalova (2)

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Conductor: Robert Jindra

Stage director: Ondřej Havelka

Set design: Martin Černý

Costume design: Kateřina Štefková

Choreography: Jana Hanušová

Choirmaster: Martin Buchta

Choirmaster of the Kühn’s Children’s Choir: Jiří Chvála

Dramaturgy: Ondřej Hučín

CAST:

Forester: Svatopluk Sem

Vixen: Alžběta Poláčková

Fox: Michaela Kapustová

Schoolmaster, Mosquito: Jaroslav Březina

Priest, Badger: Luděk Vele

Harašta: Jiří Brückler

Forester’s wife, Owl: Jitka Svobodová

Keeper Pásek: Jan Markvart

Mrs. Pásková, Woodpecker: Yvona Škvárová

Dog Lapák: Jana Sýkorová

Rooster: Sylva Čmugrová

Hen: Michaela Šrůmová

Pepík: Daniel Matoušek / Jakub Turek

Frantík: Jakub Hliněnský / Martin Kalivoda

Little Vixen: Natalie Grossová / Tereza Šlosáková / Martina Vyhnanovská

Frog child: Matěj Kirov / Filip Koll / Matyáš Urbánek

Cricket child: Václav Preisler

Grasshopper child: Ema Doležalová / Kateřina Zikmundová

Midge child: Nikol Kouklová / Malvína Pachlová

National Theatre Choir, Kühn’s Children’s Choir

National Theatre Ballet and quests

National Theatre Orchestra

National Theatre (Prague)

The Cunning Little Vixen is the seventh of nine operas by Leoš Janáček (1854–1928). The composer wrote the libretto himself, basing it on a text by Rudolf Těsnohlídek which was written to accompany illustrations by Stanislav Lolek (who, among other things, was involved in forestry and hunting), which were printed in instalments by the Brno newspaper Lidové noviny from 7 April to 23 June 1920. Janáček ignored some sections of this illustrated series, while adding more detail to others, emphasizing the world of animals and scaling back the human characters. Unlike the ending of the illustrated series, in which Bystrouška marries the male fox, Zlatohřbítek, Janáček lets the titular heroine die. He began work on the opera slowly while he was still devoting himself wholeheartedly to the composition of Káťa Kabanová, in the summer of 1921. At that time he was working out a storyline for the opera. He started the actual composition of the new work in January 1922 and, with a few breaks, this kept him occupied until the beginning of 1924, i.e. it was completed in his seventieth year. The premiere was held in Brno on 6 November 1924 under the baton of František Neumann and directed by Ota Zítek.
This new production by Prague’s National Theatre clearly bears the imprint of the director, Ondřej Havelka, with its stylization from the swing era of the 1920s, when women began to be completely emancipated, as Bystrouška demonstrates in the opera.
This work, which blends the animal world with the human world, is not seen by Havelka as a trivial children’s story. “I didn’t want to do an illustrative production with leaping furry animals, but, on the other hand, parents mustn’t be scared to bring their children along,” he states. He sees in this work a metaphor for human life. “That is why the tails are the only animal feature,” says Havelka.

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ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841–1904)
Fanfares for the Festive Opening of the Jubilee Exhibition in Prague (1891)

BÉLA BARTÓK (1881–1945)
Concerto No. 1 for piano and orchestra
Allegro moderato – Allegro
Andante – attacca
Allegro molto

MARC-ANDRÉ DALBAVIE (1961)
Variations on a theme by Janáček

strong>LEOŠ JANÁČEK (1854–1928) Sinfonietta     
Allegretto (Fanfare)
Andante (Hrad, Brno)
Moderato (The Queen’s Monastery, Brno)
Allegretto (The Street Leading to the Castle)
Andante con moto (The Town Hall, Brno)

Denis Kozhukhin – piano
Aleksandar Marković –conductor

This concert will get off to a suitably festive start – with fanfares, which, although written by Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904), will be unfamiliar to listeners. Dvořák wrote the Fanfares for four trumpets and timpani for the opening of the Jubilee Exhibition held in Prague in 1891. From six o’clock in the morning on 15 May, the day of the exhibition opening, the fanfares sounded from Prague’s towers, and on the same day, during the gala opening of the exhibition, they were played from the gallery of the entrance gate to the exhibition grounds. Unlike Dvořák’s musical notes, which called for four trumpeters, for the exhibition their number was raised to sixteen. An interesting feature of the fanfares is the almost identical form of the basic timpani figure to the children’s nursery rhyme “Ho, ho, there the cows go” and the almost identical melodic outline to the Austrian imperial anthem.

Béla Bartók (1881–1945) wrote of his First Piano Concerto, “Over the last year I’ve been studying music prior to Bach and I imagine some traces of that can be seen, for example, in my Piano Concerto…” Bartók worked on it from August until November 1926 and eventually he was the first to perform it under the baton of Wilhelm Furtwängler. The premiere took place in July 1927 at the International Contemporary Music Society festival in Frankfurt It is interesting to note that he personally played this new work in Prague in 1927 with the Czech Philharmonic. The composer also engaged in lengthy discussions about the work with Leoš Janáček. Bartók and Janáček shared an interest in folk music, which was a strong source of inspiration for both of them.

The French composer Marc-André Dalbavie (1961) was commissioned to write a new work by the prestigious Suntory Hall in Tokyo. Dalbavie wrote the twenty-minute Variations on a Theme by Janáček for this concert hall and personally conducted the premiere there in 2006. Dalbavie dedicated the composition to the composer Henri Dutilleux. The Variations have also been performed by the famous Orchestre de Paris. The Janáček theme was borrowed from the piano cycle In the Mists. It is also worth noting that Dalbavie was inspired by Janáček in his Sinfonietta.

And it is in fact Leoš Janáček’s (1854–1928) Sinfonietta which brings the Brno Philharmonic’s concert to a close. Janáček completed it in 1926, and it proved to be his last orchestral work. The composition was dedicated to Václav Talich and was first conducted by him as part of the 8th Sokol Rally in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic on 26 June of the same year in the Municipal House. The concert was broadcast on radio. The critics rated the Sinfonietta alongside the symphonic rhapsody Taras Bulba as the pinnacles of Janáček’s orchestral work, an evaluation which remains true to this day. On 4 December 1927 Janáček’s article Meine Stadt was published in the Prager Presse and it was published in Czech on 24 December of the same year as Moje město (My City). In this short text Janáček wrote about the milestones in his life from childhood experiences from the period of the Prussian-Austrian war of 1866, through other mostly bleak experiences, to the day when the Czechoslovak Republic was declared: “And suddenly I saw the city miraculously transformed. […] Above the city shone the enchanting glow of freedom, the rebirth of 28 October 1918! I looked into it, I belonged to it. And from the sound of the victorious trumpets, the holy calm in the Queen’s Monastery on Úvoz, the night-time shadows and the breath of green hills and the sight of this distinct growth and size of the city, a sinfonietta grew inside me from this knowledge, from my city of Brno!” Here Janáček combined the experience of the end of the war with the establishment of Czechoslovakia in his composition. The Sinfonietta, at first called Military Sinfonietta by the composer (and presented as Rally Sinfonietta at the premiere) was originally meant to be played outdoors. Gradually, however, it grew to be a work of symphonic stature. The opening fanfare movement is played by brass instruments and timpani, and it recurs in expanded form in the fifth movement. The middle movement describes that “holy calm of the Queen’s Monastery”, while the second and fourth movements frame it with contrasting styles. For the Prague premiere Janáček provided programme names for each movement – Fanfares, Castle, Queen’s Monastery, Street and Town Hall. Later these titles were dropped and the simpler Sinfonietta was retained. The composition was dedicated to the patroness Rosa Newmarch, who in 1926 facilitated Janáček’s artistic trip to England. In December 1926 Otto Klemperer conducted the Sinfonietta in Wiesbaden, and during Janáček’s lifetime there followed performances in Brno, Berlin, London, Vienna and Dresden.

Pavel Petráněk

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Co-production between The National Theatre Brno and Opera Gothenburg.

Janáček completed his seventh opera, The Makropulos Affair, in 1925, when he was 71. But why did he choose Čapek’s play, which at first sight appears so thematically different from all of Janáček’s other operas? It seems to have been from a need to reflect on a life nearing its end and the meaning of life and death. This can already be seen in The Cunning Little Vixen, where death goes hand in hand with birth. Janáček’s pantheistic outlook is obvious here: nature has its own order and, though it may appear cruel, it is the only conceivable and logical one. The Makropulos Affair examines what would happen if this order were artificially tampered with. For someone who has lived to be 300 years old, life becomes unbearable. Faith and the meaning of existence are lost. To outward appearances, such a person becomes a faultless personality, but inwardly they are transformed into a kind of monster. It would appear that the premiere of Čapek’s play arrived at precisely the right time and coincided with the composer’s own thoughts. The premiere of the opera took place at the Brno National Theatre in the City Theatre building (today’s Mahen Theatre) on December 26 1929 and met with great success. This was partly due to the excellent staging by the conductor František Neumann, the director Ota Zítek and Alexandra Čvanová in the lead role (who, incidentally, took on this role at only 29 years of age). What is it that continues to fascinate us about this opera today? No doubt there is its modernity and exclusive setting, where people use cars and telephones, but it also has the mystery and tension of a well-constructed detective story. However, its success is mainly due to the brilliance of Janáček’s music and his ability as a composer to perfectly combine words and music into one unique operatic whole.