NEW OPERA IN OSTRAVA - Part III

Examining my “welcome packet” that first evening in Ostrava, Monday June 15, I was surprised to find 18 singers, 3 per part, listed for Canticum Ostrava. I’d requested a choir of six voices who could be soloists. Had I known there would be 18 singers, I would have happily written for them all and it would have been merrily microtonal. On Tuesday morning I received notice that the packet was incorrect, there would be 12 voices, 2 for each part. Doubling the voices just might be the best approach! After breakfast I headed to the rehearsal taking place in the Jiri Myron theater where the performance would be. This was with the choreographer, Carolina Arandia, and five young dancers, all students, and was more about placement and entrances, nothing too detailed yet. Late that afternoon I would have my first meeting with the choir with Petr Kotik conducting. It was slow going and I found myself questioning the ability of the group to deal with the music. While there was nothing too complex in the parts themselves, it did require them to be fully confident as soloists including close attention to timing and intonation, especially in the final section of Scene 5: Lens On Exile, where, over the three strings, the mezzo-soprano has a solo singing a William Blake poem that I had found relevant to the notion of the infinite:

He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy

He who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Painting by William Blake

The initial instrumental rehearsal was the next afternoon with Petr Kotik conducting the Ostravska Bandska in the orchestra room in the nearby Antonin Dvorak Theater. NYC violinist Conrad Harris is the concertmaster - a very good thing! And great that my old friend and improvising partner Gareth Davis would be playing the bass clarinet part. Had I known in advance, I might have written more to exploit his personal extended techniques. Petr is meticulous in his conducting and we worked through the score in a linear fashion, occasionally redoing a particularly gnarly section but mostly without repetition in an effort to get through as much as possible. One clarinetist and one trumpeter would not be arriving until the following week but the ensemble still sounded fine albeit a touch ragged in places. I’d brought my H6 Recorder to record selected passages which would be processed using resonating filters, delays, reverberation, granular delays, and layering to create samples that would, in performance, sonically augment particular sections. I would repeat this process with the next choir rehearsal. By the end of this first session, we had rehearsed about 55% of the music. Things sounded as desired for the most part but some sections required a bit of tweaking or discussion of techniques so as to best manifest in sound what was written. After the rehearsal, Gareth and I found a decent Belgian restaurant for a bite and then I returned to the hotel to work on the samples.

Over the next few days, there would be rehearsals for the various components of the opera: orchestra, choir, dancers, staging, videos, lighting, and Valentino as Spinoza. Working in the theater, these elements were refined and repeated with the overall look and feel of the work coming more and more into focus. Fantastic staging and lighting effects by Pavla Beranova added dramatic enhancement. The pianist accompanying the rehearsals (outside of the those with the orchestra) was Krisztina Orvos who did a phenomenal job of bringing out the musicality in my sometimes skeletal piano reductions, not only playing the parts but giving cues to the performers. On Sunday, June 21, we had our first full rehearsal with all of the musical elements in place (though without staging) in the Orchestra Room of the Dvorak. To be candid, it felt disastrous with abundant errors, not to mention completely missed cues, especially from the choir. I wasn’t at all happy with their timing and intonation. As a result, some rearrangement of parts were made. I was also still adjusting the samples I’d made - some had to be stretched in duration, some made shorter, a few eliminated completely! The saving grace of the rehearsal was Valentino’s singing - even in low-energy rehearsal mode, he sounded amazingly great. That night, a local promoter, Martin Rezny, had arranged for me to perform a solo acoustic guitar set at a welcoming pub near the river, the Milos. Opening was a trombone duet by Stepan Janousek and Jan Jirucha, both members of Ostravska Bandska. Their set was an exciting improvised panorama of extended techniques and acoustic phenomena. I followed with a performance of Momentum Anomaly on the handmade steel-string acoustic guitar provided for me. The guitar was not loud but it had a bright and balanced sound and the overtones and difference tone effects could be easily heard.

Monday, the 22nd, would be a long day starting with tech in the morning at the Jiri Myron Theater. Microphones were placed for the orchestra and choir and I began auditioning my samples through the house system and adding compression, equalization, and reverb until they sounded right on their own - more tweaking would occur when leveling the samples with the live musicians and singers. Sounds for the singers and instruments were also adjusted. We created a patch in the desk with chorus and reverb for the choir that helped with the more egregious intonation issues as well as adding the proper ambience. At 1400 we began a tense two hour rehearsal that revealed more problems to be addressed as well as some moments of great beauty. I left somewhat heartened and put some of the previous day’s mess behind me. In a post-rehearsal meeting, Petr assured me that this was what rehearsals in Czechia were like: ragged beginnings with everything finally coming together in the performance. I returned to the hotel to find Janene in her post-flight coma having traveled overnight from NYC to Wien and then taken the train to Ostrava. After coffee, we met Nicholas Isherwood for dinner at a nearby Japanese restaurant (quite good but still, when traveling, I prefer to eat “local”.)

Daily rehearsals on the 23rd and 24th further refined the work on stage as well as allowing me to finally fix placement and levels for my sound and sample cues. That night, Janene and I attended the premiere of Richard Ayres’ monodrama David about his father’s descent into dementia with Nicholas playing the role to the hilt. Given the dark nature of a lot of the parts sung by Nicholas in works by Kagel, Stockhausen, and myself, the great surprise is what a fantastic comic performer he is. In David he plays both the tragic and the comic - sometimes both simultaneously! On the 25th we had a dress rehearsal. I can’t say that it was completely successful - there were still missed cues and errors but when it all worked, it looked and sounded wonderful. I remembered Petr’s words as I thought about our upcoming premiere on the next day.