Un mondo di clowns, Visioni catastrofiche , filosofia e un'era antica al Festival di musica contemporanea di Ostrava NODO – Un'irresistibile urgenza di riflettere su questo mondo

Seven new operas over five festival days will explore subjects ranging from old age and dementia to philosophy, science, ecological visions of the future, and the world of clowns and travelling performers. From June 23 to 27, the eighth edition of the NODO / New Opera Days Ostrava will present works by Czech and international composers that demonstrate opera’s continuing vitality as an art form capable of responding to the contemporary world, asking questions, and offering new ways of understanding it. Festival preparations are in full swing, with several creative teams already in Ostrava for intensive rehearsals. This year again, each performance will be preceded by a dramaturgical introduction.

Music journalist, dramaturg, and long-time festival collaborator Boris Klepal will guide audiences through the context of the works, their creators, and the broader landscape of contemporary opera. The following text was written by him. Everything begins with percussion and ends with clowns. No subject is off limits for opera, and if something cannot be fully expressed through spoken theatre, it has to be sung. Over the course of five days, seven new operas will immerse audiences in worlds of circus life, catastrophic visions, philosophy, anatomy, music theory, and old age. Czech and international works, represented in almost equal measure, form a festival programme that reflects a significant strand of contemporary music theatre. Above all, it is a strand that seeks not only to engage audiences and draw them into its emotional worlds, but also to leave a lasting impression long after they leave the theatre. A powerful yet fleeting experience should be followed by a long resonance – an irresistible urge to reflect on the world, or at least on a small part of it. Since its inception, New Opera Days Ostrava has given opportunities to new voices. This year’s festival will open with Company by emerging Czech composer and first-time opera creator Kristýna Švihálková. Inspired by the writing of Samuel Beckett, the concise text unfolds over a soundscape of percussion and electronics. British composer Richard Ayres introduces his new work No. 61 (David) in simple terms: “My father has dementia.” The opera attempts to enter that world through the eyes of an empathetic, attentive, and precise observer – one with a remarkable ability to capture subtle meanings and emotional shifts in music, to avoid sentimentality, and to remain deeply humane and often surprisingly funny.

Slovak composer Miroslav Tóth returns with White Death, another large-scale project in which he reflects on the future of life on Earth. Following a vision of humanity forced to relocate to the Moon and an encounter with clones on a ski slope in the Beskydy Mountains, Tóth now introduces shooting trees and caregiving androids. This time, his expansive musical world will unfold in the open-air setting of Comenius Gardens. Composer Milan Guštar engages with the legacy of microtonal music pioneer Alois Hába. His music is discussed far more often than it is performed, and few people today are familiar with his theoretical writings. Guštar’s opera New Theory of Harmony borrows the title of Hába’s seminal treatise, quotes from it, and transforms it into a living source of inspiration on the operatic stage. NODO audiences may recall the festival’s remarkable production of Hába’s opera Thy Kingdom Come. Jakub Rataj, meanwhile, seems to have shifted his attention from the recurring theme of human breath to that of vision. His opera In the Eyes of the Dragonfly is inspired by Japanese haiku, in which the beauty of the visible world unfolds into a fascinating kaleidoscope through the eyes of a fragile insect. Everything changes; everything passes away. The fascinating intellectual Baruch Spinoza introduced the concept of an infinite divine substance – one of the most remarkable ideas in the history of philosophy. Yet for the Church of his time, both the philosopher and his teachings were unacceptable. Today, Spinoza is regarded as one of the defining thinkers of the seventeenth century, standing alongside figures such as Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. Many years later, Albert Einstein would also acknowledge his intellectual debt to him. In SUBSTANCE: The Infinite Spinoza, American composer Elliott Sharp surrounds the audience with the boundless presence of Nature and God – two names, in Spinoza’s philosophy, for the same underlying reality from which everything emerges.

The festival will conclude with Clown(s). Following in the footsteps of the immensely popular and endlessly revived Pagliacci, this is another opera devoted to the lives of travelling performers – the transience of their art and the depth concealed behind their masks. Montreal-based Serbian composer Ana Sokolović has chosen a subject that evokes memories of Federico Fellini’s La Strada and the films of Charlie Chaplin; of the acting genius of Peter Sellers, Rowan Atkinson, and Sacha Baron Cohen; of The Last of the Pierrots and Bohuslav Martinů’s Marionettes. All of these traces lead back to the tradition of travelling theatre, with its need to communicate quickly and directly, while leaving audiences with memories strong enough to bring them back the next day – and again a year later. The full festival program can be found here: www.newmusicostrava.cz/en/nodo/program. NODO / New Opera Days Ostrava 2026 owes its existence to the support of the City of Ostrava, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, as well as many other institutions, foundations, and private-sector partners. The Ostrava Center for New Music would especially like to thank Libor and Veronika Winkler and Martin and Hana Vohánka for their long-term generous support. Special thanks also go to the festival’s new partner, OSTRA GROUP. For providing the Palace venue, thanks belong to the development group ANTRACIT, for technical support to the Composition department of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. The festival’s general media partner is Czech Radio Vltava, while the main media partner is Czech Television. The NODO biennial festival was founded in 2012 as a joint initiative of the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre and the Ostrava Center for New Music. Since then, the festival has established itself as one of the few exceptional platforms in Central Europe systematically dedicated to initiating and producing new opera works. To date, NODO has presented more than forty operatic productions. Each biennial edition brings not only new titles, but also fresh and authentic impulses for rethinking what opera can mean in the 21st century. This year, the festival was selected by the British magazine Gramophone for its prestigious list of world classical music festivals. The only other Czech festivals included were Prague Spring and Janáček Brno. 18/06 Comunicato Stampa Foto: Martin Popelar Info: www.newmusicostrava.cz bellaunavitaalloperablogpost.com