NEW OPERA IN OSTRAVA - Part II

At the suggestion of Petr Kotik, I sent the Substance score and libretto plus some descriptive text to Renata, Kristyna, and Barbora in Ostrava CZ where they direct the biennial festival New Opera Days Ostrava (NODO) alternating with Ostrava Days, a festival of new music performances, lectures, and discussions. I soon received the wonderful news that NODO was interested in staging Substance and that they would pair me with a Czech director and crew. Janene’s videos would be an integral part of the production as well.

The first step to getting the production going was for me to meet with the Prague-based director, Lukas Jiricki. In an online video conference, we had a relaxed discussion about shared esthetic goals and strategies in opera as well as science fiction and other literature that we both held in esteem. We also found that we had some Prague friends in common. Lukas worked with lighting designer Pavla Beranova and choreographer Carolina Arandia and after another fine virtual meeting, they would also be part of the team. Canticum Ostrava, a local choir, would be in the team as well as I had asked to have six singers from bass to soprano who could function as soloists as well as a chorus.

Valentino Blasina & E#

There were tenor singers that I would have liked to use to play the role of Baruch Spinoza but as budget would be limited, I constrained my search to a few ‘local’ tenors that were suggested to me by the festival. Going through resumes and online videos, I was especially struck by one, Valentino Blasina, a Croatian singer then living in Graz, Austria. His voice and demeanor seemed to resonate with how I imagined Spinoza would be on stage. I sent him the tenor part as well as the full score for him to peruse. Soon after, in November I flew to Europe for a solo concert in Linz, Austria as part of the opening for artist Peter Kogler’s exhibition Alphabet City at the Francisco Carolinum Museum. Valentino emailed me that he would attend. I performed a 45-minute improvisation on an electroacoustic guitar with electronics. After the show, Valentino introduced himself and we had a brief but extremely cordial conversation about the opera and about my performance on this evening and how for him, it brought to life some of the elements of my composed score. I was very pleased with our meeting and felt confident that he would be the right singer to play Spinoza.

https://www.ooekultur.at/exhibition-detail/peter-kogler

Over the next months discussions and correspondence between Lukas and I continued with Carolina, Pavla, and Janene also joining the meetings. The concepts of staging for the opera began to take shape. Working with a director was somewhat of a novel experience for me. After a difficult series of conflicts between the assistant director and myself during rehearsals for my 2009 opera Binibon, I had made the decision that for any new productions, I would be the sole artistic and dramatic director. This approach worked well for Port Bou, Instant Opera, Filiseti Mekidesi, and Die Grösste Fuge but the situation for Substance was different: the festival was collaborating with a theater company to present the chosen operas and I would have to trust the director, in this case Lukas, with translating the score into a production that would embody his particular ideas for staging and the use of video. My radar told me to fully accept this particular corner of the universe and what it was presenting to me as a course of action.

There was a fair amount of preparatory work to be completed including extracting parts for the individual players and singers and creating a piano reduction of the full score for the rehearsal pianist to use in working with Valentino and the chorus. This last task posed special problems as most of the score for Substance is constructed from counterpoint, both in notes and in textures. Adaptations had to be made for the pianist to be able to play something that would give all of the singers a concrete sense of the structure and timings as well as the pitched material and dronalities. These preparations continued right up to my point of departure in June though interrupted by my May tour in Italy. Tense but constructive meetings with Petr Kotik took place right up to my departure for Italy with his guidance helping me to create an optimized score to meet his preferences. Back in my studio, I was also able to generate and tweak some of the synthesized parts that would be played along with the orchestra and choir using both my library of samples of my own sounds and processes as well as the Korg Volca Modular and Korg MS20 hardware synths and the iVCS3, an incredibly good soft-synth emulation of the iconic VCS3.

With all elements pretty much in place, I flew to Wien, Austria on June 12 for a solo concert at Celeste on the 13th followed by another one in Prague on the 14th at Punctum after which I headed to Ostrava. Nicholas Isherwood was in Ostrava to sing a new opera by Richard Ayres and so for my first evening there, we headed to a traditional Moravian restaurant out in the suburbs where NIcholas had the classic beef Svíčková and I a “light snack” of duck magret with potato dumplings plus red cabbage with apples.