Title photo: The Makropulos Affair. Credit: Annemie Augustijns. // Janacek Festival.
Brno, Sep 20 (BD) – This year the Czech Republic celebrates 100 years since the creation of Czechoslovakia with events across the country. Fittingly the Janacek Theatre is ready to join the party, reopening after a year out of action and a 600 Million crown makeover. It is one of the main venues for the 6th Janacek Festival, who are commemorating the historic event with a series of concerts dedicated to the centenary. The programme is almost entirely composed of the works of the theatre’s namesake, Leos Janacek.
In a year of anniversaries and connections, the organizers have chosen to open the Festival with his opera The Cunning Little Vixen, the same work that gave the theatre its premiere when it opened its doors in October 1965. It is, according to the Festival’s website, “a charming reflection of life in a young and successfully developing state.”
The rest of the festival program features all the composer’s operas, plus piano recitals, concerts, and orchestral performances of his other major works. Other than the Janacek theatre performances are taking place in a variety of venues across town, from the intimate (a string quartet playing in the Löw-Beer Villa) to the epic (the new production of Libuše making full use of the Brno Exhibition Centre’s gigantic Pavilion P).
Photo: Jenufa, one of Janacek’s most famous operas. Credit: Magdalena Osko. // Janacek Festival.
Highlights also include The Makropulos Affair (Opera Vlaanderen), a prescient opera with its heroine doomed to live for 300 years, particularly relevant today with scientists working on a “cure” for aging; and the students of the Brno Conservatory performing their first full-length production at the Festival, a double bill performance of the Janacek’s only ballet Rákos Rákoczy and opera The Beginning of a Romance; last but not least, a group from Poznan’s Teatr Wielki, one of the leading Polish opera ensembles in the co-production of Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie and Teatro Comunale di Bologna are preparing Jenufa, one of Janacek’s most famous opera works.
The opera performances include English subtitles and tickets are selling fast, so if you want to be part of this fantastic musical event, act quickly…
Find here the festival’s program in the English language: http://www.janacek-brno.cz/en/program.html.
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