National Theatre Prague
Musical preparation: Jan Kučera
Conductor: Jan Kučera
Stage director: Sláva Daubnerová
Sets and costumes: Marija Havran
Dramaturgy: Pavel Graus
Lighting design: Pavel Kotlík
Videoart: Lukáš Kodoň
Chorus master: Marek Vorlíček, The Kühn Choir of Prague Premiere: December 17, 2014
Festivals: The International Theatre Festival Eurokontext Bratislava 2016, Opera Nova Festival 2018 Prague
Two extravagant Dmitri Shostakovich’s works give one of the possible answers to the question of what form should opera take after the final end of Romanticism. All that has remained from the ambitious avant-garde opus Orango, about a human-ape, is an eloquent fragment. The Antiformalist Rayok is the composer’s bitterly grotesque protest against the dunces controlling culture in the Soviet Union, and elsewhere too.
“Slovak director Sláva Daubnerová tied the pieces together with two clever devices. Before Orango started, a bizarre trio – three men in dark suits, seemingly spray-painted in white from the chest up – were shown to seats in the front row. They didn’t like the performance and left in disgust halfway through, which made sense when they turned out to be the three main speakers in Anti-Formalist Rayok. And she inserted Shostakovich himself as a character, conducting the music in the first piece, playing the piano in the second, and generally getting pushed around and intimidated the entire evening. The part was played by Czech pianist, conductor and composer Jan Kučera, who looked uncannily like his Russian counterpart…A final takeaway from the evening: Sláva Daubnerová, 34, is a talent to watch. She showed a solid command of the material, had original ideas and struck just the right note of black humor. And the final transformation of the white-topped apparatchiks into plaster busts was brilliant. Shostakovich would have been pleased.” Frank Kuznik, Bachtrack
“Of the operas, the progressive staging of two pieces by Dmitry Shostakovich, Orango and the Anti-formalistic Rayok, by National Theatre in Prague brought a rare image of the less-known and experimental paths of this genre. Orango, a fragment of avant-garde satirical composition of the Russian musician is based on a rare scientific feat when a orangutan female was inseminated by human semen…The Prague staging, played together with another of Shostakovich’s work, is directed by Slovak experimental artist Sláva Daubnerová. Anti-formalistic Rayok is a musical parody on Stalin and Stalinism, on all totalitarian regimes based on the personality cult, on pretence and on the leadership dictating everything including official art forms. Rayok is a word invented by the composer and used only in this context, meaning a bizarre fair promenading a freak show of politicians, officials and dictators.” Zuzana Vilikovská, The Slovak Spectator
