Suffice it to say that David Radok, director of the Brno Salome<\/em>, is the son of Alfr\u00e9d, a legend of twentieth-century Czech theatre, co-creator \u2013 with Milo\u0161 Forman, among others \u2013 of the famous Laterna Magika, and a member of the D34 theatre company founded by Emil Franti\u0161ek Burian. Emil Franti\u0161ek, in turn, was the son of Emil Burian, one of the first performers of the role of the eponymous Jacobin in Dvor\u00e1k\u2019s opera. Emil\u2019s younger brother Karel Burian sang the role of Herodes at the premiere of Salome<\/em> at the Semperoper. When I began to investigate what the young Lucie Ka\u0148kov\u00e1, Terinka in the Brno Jakob\u00edn<\/i>, meant when she claimed to come from a family of respected Prague musicians, I discovered that on her father\u2019s side she was a great-great-granddaughter of Jan Nepomuk Ka\u0148ka, Beethoven\u2019s composer and lawyer friend, and on her mother\u2019s side \u2013 a great-granddaughter of the violinist Jind\u0159ich Feld, whose students included Rafael Kubelik. I postponed further research, so as not to be influenced by anything. What if the apples did fall far from the tree this time?<\/p>\n Salome<\/em>. Linda Ballov\u00e1 in the title role, and Jaroslav B\u0159ezina (Herodes). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek<\/p>\n Born in 1954, David Radok emigrated with his family from Czechoslovakia after the defeat of the Prague Spring. He learned his craft in Gothenburg, primarily at the Folkteater, where his father Alfr\u00e9d found refuge. He made his debut as a director at the local opera house with a staging of Menotti\u2019s The Medium<\/em>. In fact, he has continued his collaboration with Scandinavian companies to this day: he is the man behind the Peter Grimes <\/em>production, dusted off after nearly thirty years and very well received in Copenhagen, which in May saved the honour of the Operaen, when a co-production with Warsaw\u2019s Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera fell through for reasons that are yet to be explained. He has dozens of productions to his credit, primarily of Baroque and modernist operas. His stagings are clean, but dark, precise and marked by a uniquely Czech brand of black humour. This was also the case of Salome<\/em>, although the action, set on an almost empty stage enclosed on three sides by a brick structure reminiscent of the interior of the ruined Basilica of Maxentius in Rome (set design by Dragan Stoj\u010devski), unfolded rather sluggishly at first. I suspect that the director may have intended to build tension in this powerful one-act opera by means of the Hitchcock method, but the earthquake started only with the confrontation between Salome and Jochanaan. When the prophet emerged, dripping with water, from the trapdoor \u2013 with a black sack over his head, hauled out of the palace cistern in chains \u2013 the audience shuddered with horror for the first time. Radok\u2019s concept proved coherent: Herodes\u2019 palace was a universal metaphor for totalitarian violence and decay of all values. Hence the bizarre hotchpotch of costumes (designed by Zuzana Je\u017ekova), ranging from operetta-style liveries, uniforms and suits, silk gowns and d\u00e9shabill\u00e9s, to the slightly over-the-top idea of having The Page of Herodias wear a Muslim niqab; hence the repulsive austerity of the sets and the terrifying indifferentism of the protagonists. There are only monsters roaming around the stage. Had the footmen not rushed to wipe the blood on the floor, Narraboth\u2019s suicide would have gone unnoticed. Orgies and scheming take place somewhere in the background, almost imperceptibly, behind the semi-translucent glass of the palace\u2019s living room. Paradoxically, the character that turns out to be the most human in the drama is the weak, demoralised Herodes \u2013 shouting that he will not allow the saviour of the world to raise the dead, because that would be horrible; frozen in humiliation when Salome, in the finale of the Dance of the Seven Veils, pushes his face into her crotch; vomiting with fear and disgust, when his stepdaughter gets her way and has the servants bring Jochanaan\u2019s severed head on a silver platter. My perception of the Brno production may have been influenced by the current events in Poland \u2013 but I have to admit that the downfall of the grotesque tetrarch made a much bigger impression on me than the dilemmas and frustrations of the utterly spoiled Salome.<\/p>\n It is more likely, however, I was a bit disappointed by the performer of the title role, the Slovakian Linda Ballov\u00e1 \u2013 an excellent and extremely convincing actress as a psychopathic Lolita Salome, but possessing a soprano that I cannot, for the life of me, associate with a \u201csixteen-year-old princess with the voice of an Isolde\u201d as Strauss himself suggested. Ballov\u00e1\u2019s voice, relatively small, artificially darkened and characterised by a persistent, uncontrolled vibrato, pales in comparison with the luminous, truly girlish sopranos of Destinn and Cebotari, and above all the phenomenal Olive Fremstad, who sang Salome in the American premiere of the work at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907. Despite the powerful orchestration, those singers easily cut through the dense tutti: Ballov\u00e1 continuously struggled with the matter, at times departing from the musical text, and even the famous low G flat on the last word of her monologue was lost in the flood of instrumental chords.<\/p>\n Salome. <\/em>Linda Ballov\u00e1. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek<\/p>\n However, the other members of the cast did a great job, led by the phenomenal \u2013 also acting-wise \u2013 Jaroslav B\u0159ezina in the role of Herodes. Warm words of praise should go to Vit Nosek, who sang Narraboth with a rounded and ardent tenor, although he was not fully able to cope with the tasks entrusted to him by the director. The vengeful Heriodias was successfully portrayed by the experienced Eva Urbanov\u00e1, a singer endowed with a powerful and superbly controlled soprano; Jochanaan was convincingly sung by the German baritone Birger Radde, a technically superb, extremely musical singer with a voice that is exceptionally noble, beautiful and rich. Marko Ivanovic led the whole thing with an assured hand, but at times paying too much attention to polishing individual details \u2013 at the expense of the agitated, kaleidoscopic narrative of this remarkable score.<\/p>\n After such intense impressions of the previous evening, the meeting with Jakob\u00edn<\/i> obviously took place in a completely different atmosphere. The fruit of Dvor\u00e1k\u2019s second collaboration with the librettist Marie \u010cervinkova-Riegrova \u2013 after the mediocre success of the 1882 production of Dimitrij<\/em> – proved to be the first real triumph in the composer\u2019s operatic career. The story of Bohu\u0161, son of Count Vil\u00e9m \u2013 who returns to his homeland incognito, together with his wife Julie, only to discover that his father is still convinced that his first-born has allied himself in France with the Jacobins and married a woman of ill repute in Paris \u2013 runs parallel to the love story of Terinka, daughter of the choirmaster Benda, and Ji\u0159\u00ed, gamekeeper at the count\u2019s estates, jealous of burgrave Filip, who is courting his fianc\u00e9e. Dramaturgically, the thing struggles a bit, musically it dazzles, both with the lyricism of the vocal parts and the sumptuous orchestration as well as references to, on the one hand, Czech folklore and on the other \u2013 Italian comic opera and the op\u00e9ra \u00e0 sauvetage<\/em>, a genre popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the example of which was also Beethoven\u2019s Fidelio<\/em>.<\/p>\n Jakob\u00edn. <\/i>Pavla Vykopalov\u00e1 (Julie), Jan \u0160\u0165\u00e1va (Filip), and Roman Hoza (Bohu\u0161). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek This convoluted story was tackled by Martin Glaser, a director a generation younger than Radok, but nevertheless faithful to the Czech tradition of engaged theatre, imbued with the spirit of satire and, at the same time, with the poetic magic of old school plays, which, in the words of Jan Komensk\u00fd, were to entertain in a way that would make \u201cour games a preparation for serious matters\u201d. In his delightfully colourful Jakob\u00edn<\/i> we can find not only inspirations from eighteenth-century Hanakian opera, but also less obvious, perhaps not entirely conscious references to the oeuvres of other directors from this part of Europe (I’m thinking of, for example, the undulating wooden platforms known from Nekro\u0161ius\u2019 productions, with which Glaser builds the landscape of an imaginary town just as evocatively as he creates the interior of the count\u2019s palace). How I miss such stagings: beautiful, clean and clear, human in the most literal sense of the word, provoking laughter and emotion, perfectly coupled with the composer\u2019s idea.<\/p>\n This makes it all the more gratifying that the main contributor to the success of Jakob\u00edn<\/i> was the Jan\u00e1\u010dek Theatre team. The singers permanently affiliated with the Brno company were completed by just two artists: Lucie Ka\u0148kov\u00e1, a singer blessed with a luminous, colourful soprano beautifully opened at the top, and Ale\u0161 Briscein as Ji\u0159\u00ed, an indefatigable and reliable tenor, who brings to mind Klaus Florian Vogt \u2013 the difference being, however, that, unlike the German star, he has a truly beautiful voice and uses it with admirable musicality. A lovely pair of the main protagonists came from Pavla Vykopalov\u00e1 (Julie), whose soft soprano had already delighted me in The<\/em> Greek Passion<\/em>, and the extraordinarily versatile baritone Roman Hoza (Bohu\u0161), who had clearly worked diligently during his master classes with Christa Ludwig. The indisposed Petr Lev\u00ed\u010dek heroically faced adversity and won over the audience with his bravura portrayal of the choirmaster Benda. The two priests from the production of Martin\u016f\u2019s opera I had seen \u2013 David Szendiuch and Jan \u0160\u0165\u00e1va \u2013 showed themselves at their best as Count Vil\u00e9m and the grotesque burgrave Filip. The role of the disreputable Adolf, who tries to seize Bohu\u0161\u2019s inheritance, was entrusted to Tade\u00e1\u0161 Hoza, Roman\u2019s younger brother, who possesses a baritone equally well placed, albeit a bit brighter and open more widely in the upper register. Jakub Klecker conducted, making good use of his extensive choral and choirmaster experience in this singing score.<\/p>\n Jakob\u00edn<\/i>. David Szendiuch (Count Vil\u00e9m). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek<\/p>\n Given the lack of operatic excitement in Poland, I will have to visit Brno more often. If I were to die in an isolation hospital, like field chaplain Maty\u00e1\u0161 from The Good Soldier \u0160vejk<\/em>, no one would be pulling their hair out in despair after me. My record is clean: even if I borrowed one thousand eight hundred crowns from someone, I gave it back long ago.<\/p>\n Translated by Anna Kijak<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When it became clear that the number of premieres of this year\u2019s season at Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera would come down to a total of three \u2013 a certain co-production that we will see four years after its opening in Salzburg lambasted by the critics; yet another staging of one of the most popular operas … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-mangusta","4":"post-7811","6":"format-standard","7":"category-posts-in-english","8":"category-wedrowki-operowe"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7811"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7828,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7811\/revisions\/7828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/52985651195_d349a1cc21_o-scaled-1.jpg\")
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