New Operas by Chamber Opera of the Janáček Academy

9 = 3 x 3 That’s 3 composers, 3 librettists and 3 directors. And also three new chamber operas by young artists from the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts. Their works are regularly performed at the Janáček Brno Festival, but this year’s opera harvest at JAMU was so rich that the 9th edition of the festival will host three one-act operas in one evening.

Echo and Narcissus by composer Kateřina Slaběňáková and librettist Vojtěch Balcar is a contemporary variation on the well-known ancient myth. Narcissus and Echo meet in our noisy and hectic world, but they are no longer the ones Ovid wrote about. When Echo falls in love with Narcissus today, she has the opportunity to say many things, and yet it will never be what she truly feels. Narcissus, on the other hand, is unable to get rid of his false reflection, behind which his real personality remains hidden, and so they tragically pass each other in overwhelming times and end up alone.

The librettist Václav Alexa and the composer Kateřina Szymeczková were inspired to write the opera Oliver by the personality of the remarkable scientist, doctor and writer Oliver Sacks. In the opera, the hospital clown Oliver meets the Patient and through music he tries to direct his attention to something positive and cheerful, but at the same time he is fighting a battle with the Sickness that cannot be won, and he has to cope with the unfair, the tragic and the traumatic that can happen in life.

Creaturing is a cheerful opera, suitable for potatoes and the public, about how creatures come into the world, how they get their shape and what happens to them afterwards. Composer Noemi Savková and librettist Kristýna Brázdová playfully deal with the pitfalls creatures have to face and how they try to give meaning to their existence by doing something. How they wander and then return to themselves and to the essence. Origin and extinction. Creation and destruction. All that and nothing else, plus one recipe.

Tomáš Studený