Next year’s Janáček Brno festival promises a cross-section of Leoš Janáček’s opera work performed by top Czech and foreign creators and performers. Although it won’t take place until November 2024, advance ticket sales have already started this week.
The ninth year of the event will begin with the premiere of a new production of Janáček’s opera The Voyages of Mr. Brouchkova, whose hero travels to the moon and back in time to the 15th century. It was this work that inspired the organizers for the motto of the festival, which this year reads “Without borders”. Janáček’s fifth opera from 1920 will be directed by the Canadian Robert Carsen, who has previously taken on several of his works. Marko Ivanović is to conduct. The title role will be played by Scottish tenor Nicky Spence. The production is a co-production of Madrid’s Teatro Real and Germany’s Staatsoper Berlin.
Her ensemble will also bring The Makropulos Case directed by German-born Claus Guth to the festival. In its version from 2022, “realistic images of a law firm and a theater backstage alternate in transformations with even surreal moments of isolation of the main character”, according to the organizers. Sir Simon Rattle conducted last year’s event Makropulos in the German capital, while Robert Jindra takes the baton in Brno.
Adventures of the Vixen Bystrouška will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its world premiere next autumn. The audience of the festival will first see their new production in the Mahen Theater, which is being prepared by the Moravian-Silesian National Theater under the direction of the Israeli choreographer Itzik Galili and musical staging by Marek Šedivý.
On the final evening of November 24, The Adventures of the Vixen Bystrouska will be performed once more, this time directed by Jiří Heřman under the baton of Marko Ivanović with singers Kateřina Kněžíková as Bystrouska and Adam Plachetka in the role of the Reverend. This is a production that opened the festival in 2018, when the renovated Janáček Theater was opening.
The opera Její pastorkyňa will be presented by the all-female production team of director Veronika Kos Loulová, with musical staging by Anna Novotná Pešková. The project is a co-production of the Moravian Theater in Olomouc and the Janáček Opera in Brno.
The next evening will belong to director David Radok and his interpretation of Dvořák’s opera Rusalka, sung by Jana Šrejma Kačírková, Peter Berger and Jan Šťáva.
The festival will also include some rarely performed works, for example the opera Charlatan by Brno composer Pavel Haas. It had its world premiere in the Mahen Theater in 1938. The audience will see it directed by Ondřej Havelka and performed by the Ostrava Opera Ensemble. According to the organizers, Haas, who was murdered by the Nazis in the Auschwitz concentration camp in October 1944, was Janáček’s favorite student.
The Bamber Symphony Orchestra with chief conductor Jakub Hrůša and pianist Daniil Trifonov, who will play Dvořák’s concerto for piano and orchestra in G minor, or the Staatskapelle Berlin conducted by Christian Thielemann will also arrive. In Brno, he will present a concert dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the birth of Arnold Schönberg, perhaps the most important German composer of the 20th century and a pioneer of dodecaphony. Listeners will hear the symphonic poem Pelléas and Mélisande from his work.
Traditionally, new works by students of the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts or a program composed by the Brno Conservatory dedicated to the composer Vítězslava Kaprálova will also be part of the festival.
“The festival program will reach stellar heights in 2024. In a short period of time, the imaginary bar of quality has been raised to a level that meets the parameters of a first-rate European cultural event,” thinks Martin Glaser, director of the National Theater in Brno, which is organizing the event. The 2019 festival won the prestigious International Opera Award in London.
According to Glaser, the organizers will soon conclude a memorandum of cooperation with the Ministry of Culture. “They will provide us with predictable financing. Only in this way will it be possible to maintain the achieved level in the future,” adds Glaser.
