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Opera is our treasure an interview with Jiri Nekvasil.

Article Excerpt
Jiri Nekvasil now has just half a season behind him as head of the National Theatre Opera. In this short space of time he has already staged several productions of recent operas there, showing continuity with his earlier approach at the Prague State Opera. At the Prague State he presented a number of works by contemporary Czech and foreign composers, and gave space to composers at the beginning of their careers in the series "Banging on the Iron Curtain". The reactions to these productions were mixed, and his National Theatre productions have continued to provoke very different reviews from the sceptical to the enthusiastic... It shows there is certainly much to talk about.

You have just half of your first season at the National behind you. It's too early for a full judgment, but what do you think you have achieved so far?

The first season is naturally very much a start-up exercise. Apart from the immediate day-to-day work, there's the planning of the next season and even subsequent seasons. In the Autumn we had the premiere of Jan Klusak's Bertram a Mescalinda aneb Potrestana vernost [Bertram and Mescalinda, or Fidelity Punished] together with the revived premiere of his Zprava pro akademil [Report for the Academy]. At the moment were preparing the first of a series of compositions commissioned by the National Theatre. It will be premiered on the 1st of May. The opera is called Machuv denfk aneb Hynku, jak si to predstavujes? [Macha's Diary or Hynek, what's your idea of it?), composed by Emil Viklicky on a libretto by Yohanan Kaldi and it will be staged in the small-scale Kolowrat Theatre. The audience will have the chance to see a freshly completed work, and I think it's a good thing when very up-to-date pieces are written and staged immediately, even if there's a certain risk attached. Martin Smolka has just delivered his pi ano version of the opera Nagano with libretto by Jaroslav Dusek, which we shall be presenting in April of next year.

We have put on a replica of the 1969 production of Mozart's Don Giovanni with the famous stage design by Josef Svoboda The Caban brothers introduced themselves to the public in an interesting interpretation of Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen. One of our tasks now is to carry through the project Czech Triptych, which is another series of semi-staged performances of three unknown operas of the...

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