Finnish mythology tells of a mythical artefact called Sampo which ensures the well-being and continuity of the world. Contemporary science can trace the genetic footprint of humans thousands of years into the past via research into the human genome. In the near future, two neuropharmaceutical corporations are competing with each other: one of them manages to combine two achievements: to create a substance that can transfer a person into an ancient myth, and to let them experience the story of their mythical ancestors. However, this may not be as “perfect” in all its truthfulness as the stories we use to shape our identity on social networks today. Is a contemporary person prepared to know the truth about themselves?

The Kalevala is a collection of Finnish – Karelian mythology whose purely oral form was collected during visits to villages by the Finnish physician and linguist Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884). These were individual stories that Lönnrot combined into an epic narrative. The opera S.A.M.P.O. takes The Kalevala as a source of inspiration and updates its motifs and characters to create a story set in the near future. The opera was made to order by the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts for the Janáček Brno festival. It is the first collaboration of both faculties of the Janáček Academy on a project of such a type, and at the same time, it is the opera’s world premiere.

Otto Kauppinen graduated from the Faculty of Theatre, Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts, specializing in theatre dramaturgy. In 2015 -2016 he worked as a dramaturge for Brno’s Divadlo Feste Theatre. In 2017-2018 he worked closely with the Continuo Theatre in Malovice as a dramaturge and director. Otto is half Finnish and is bilingual. He has been translating contemporary Finnish drama into Czech since 2012, and has translated 13 theatre plays so far. He has won, among other things, the first prize at the 2014 Evald Schorm Awards for his translations. He is currently a doctoral student at the Faculty of Theatre, Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts. He presents the topic of his dissertation thesis, the search for a non-hierarchical relationship between the production form and the spectator, at international conferences as well as in professional journals.

Daniel Šimek studied the piano at the Brno Conservatory. In June 2019 he completed his follow-up Master´s degree in composition at the Faculty of Music, Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts. He has been studying orchestra conducting since 2018, and since 2016 he has worked as a piano teacher and accompanist at a music school in Velké Opatovice. He has been a keyboard player in the band Universe B since 2017. In 2018 he became the leader of the Mirror Ensemble, which focuses on contemporary music. He composed the pieces Shapes of Time (2018), Waves (2015), Questioning, and Head Echoes (2016–2019). He has composed music for stage projects as part of Devítka Studio and the Chamber Opera of the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts: Master (2016), the background music for a production of the Magic Flute (2017), and Unknown (2018, performed at the Janáček Brno 2018 festival).

We can inform you we have managed to reschedule Jenůfa with star cast from 5th October to 4th October. Don’t miss the performance with Karita Mattila in the role of Kostelnička! For more information, follow our website www.janacek-brno.cz a the Janáček Brno Facebook page.

Thank you for your understanding and support!

Jenůfa is one of Janáček´s most famous works, and it marked a major turning point in his oeuvre. It has been on the repertoire of Brno’s opera ensemble almost continuously since its creation in 1904. At the festival, the successful production by Martin Glaser and chief conductor Marko Ivanović will be enhanced by the presence of an exceptional guest. One of the best singers of Janáček´s characters, and a star who has performed on many renowned opera stages around the world, Finnish soprano Karita Mattila will appear at the festival in the role of Kostelnička.

Jenůfa had its beginnings in a realistic drama penned by G. Preissová (1862-1946), which the composer himself adapted into the form of an opera libretto. Even though Janáček shortened the text of the drama significantly, he managed to make the tragic impact of the story from a Moravian village even deeper. The prodigal and unstable Števa, the stern but kind-hearted Laca and above all the relentless Kostelnička, whose efforts to maintain her position and respect in the village community leads her to murder the child of her foster daughter Jenůfa – these are the characters captured by Janáček in a masterful and dramatic portrait that sends chills down one´s spine while simultaneously awakening feelings of compassion and understanding.

The work on Jenůfa took Janáček nearly nine years. He completed the first act of the opera in 1897, while the second and third were created under circumstances that were greatly tragic for Janáček´s family. In 1902 the composer´s daughter Olga became seriously ill during a visit to Janáček´s brother in St. Petersburg. Janáček completed the second act of the opera after Olga´s return and the third shortly before her death in February 1903. He dedicated Jenůfa to her memory. Janáček wanted to entrust the premiere of the opera to the Prague National Theatre but he was refused with the words that the opera was not suitable to be shown on a leading Czech stage. The first performance thus took place in Brno on 21.1.1904 and was unusually successful. It was not until 1915 that the management of the Prague theatre and conductor Karel Kovařovic were finally persuaded to perform Jenůfa. After a very well-received Prague premiere in 1916, a performance followed in Vienna and Janáček finally found success as a composer not only in the Czech Republic but also worldwide.

Autor: Patricie Částková

Jenůfa is one of Janáček´s most famous works, and it marked a major turning point in his oeuvre. It has been on the repertoire of Brno’s opera ensemble almost continuously since its creation in 1904. At the festival, the successful production by Martin Glaser and chief conductor Marko Ivanović will be enhanced by the presence of an exceptional guest. One of the best singers of Janáček´s characters, and a star who has performed on many renowned opera stages around the world, Finnish soprano Karita Mattila will appear at the festival in the role of Kostelnička.

Jenůfa had its beginnings in a realistic drama penned by G. Preissová (1862-1946), which the composer himself adapted into the form of an opera libretto. Even though Janáček shortened the text of the drama significantly, he managed to make the tragic impact of the story from a Moravian village even deeper. The prodigal and unstable Števa, the stern but kind-hearted Laca and above all the relentless Kostelnička, whose efforts to maintain her position and respect in the village community leads her to murder the child of her foster daughter Jenůfa – these are the characters captured by Janáček in a masterful and dramatic portrait that sends chills down one´s spine while simultaneously awakening feelings of compassion and understanding.

The work on Jenůfa took Janáček nearly nine years. He completed the first act of the opera in 1897, while the second and third were created under circumstances that were greatly tragic for Janáček´s family. In 1902 the composer´s daughter Olga became seriously ill during a visit to Janáček´s brother in St. Petersburg. Janáček completed the second act of the opera after Olga´s return and the third shortly before her death in February 1903. He dedicated Jenůfa to her memory. Janáček wanted to entrust the premiere of the opera to the Prague National Theatre but he was refused with the words that the opera was not suitable to be shown on a leading Czech stage. The first performance thus took place in Brno on 21.1.1904 and was unusually successful. It was not until 1915 that the management of the Prague theatre and conductor Karel Kovařovic were finally persuaded to perform Jenůfa. After a very well-received Prague premiere in 1916, a performance followed in Vienna and Janáček finally found success as a composer not only in the Czech Republic but also worldwide.

Autor: Patricie Částková

JAN JIRASKÝ’S PIANO RECITAL will take place in the first half of the evening.

Leoš Janáček – In the Mists,

Béla Bartók – Allegro barbaro,

Kryštof Mařatka – Onyrik, future and exotic tales for piano,

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky – Piano Rag Music

In the second part:

LEOŠ JANÁČEK – THE DIARY OF ONE WHO DISAPPEARED premiere of a production based on the author’s stage notes.

Janáček´s song cycle for chamber ensembles The Diary of One Who Disappeared has long been a traditional part of the festival, both in the concert and staged versions, performed by outstanding tenors such as Peter Straka and Aleš Briscein, or the excellent British tenors Toby Spence and Edgar Lyon. The Diary of One Who Disappeared won´t be absent in 2020 either, and one of Slovakia’s leading tenors, Pavol Breslík, will perform the main role in Brno for the first time. Visitors to (for instance) the New York Metropolitan Opera, the Bavarian State Opera or the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden regularly have the opportunity to hear this singer; he also participates in the Salzburg and Edinburgh festivals, in the BBC Proms, and other events.

“In the morning I wander around the garden, in the afternoon I regularly think of several motifs for those beautiful verses about gypsy love. Hopefully a nice musical romance will come out of this – and a piece of that Luhačovice mood will be in it…” Janáček wrote in a letter to Kamila Stösslová, a lady he met in Luhačovice in the summer of 1917. The young woman became Janáček’s last great love and the inspiration for his masterpieces. No wonder that under the influence of her bewitching eyes he remembered the column he had cut out from the Lidové noviny newspaper a year earlier. It was a poem named Z péra samoukova by an author who was unknown at that time, and it told of a young village boy who fell in love with a Romani girl, Zefka, and secretly ran away with her. The poem fired Janáček’s imagination and Kamila was transformed into a beautiful Roma in his eyes. Janáček worked on a collection of 22 folk-style poems for two years (eighty years later its author was discovered to be the regional writer and poet Ozef Kalda) in order to transform it into the unique song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared for tenor, mezzo-soprano, three female voices and piano. The first performance took place on 18^th April 1921 at the Reduta Theatre, Brno. It was produced by Janáček´s students – the tenor Karel Zavřel, the alto Ludmila Kvapilová-Kudláčková and the conductor Břetislav Baka­la, who was in charge of the piano score. However, the vivid execution of the songs called for staging. The first was not long in coming – it happened on 27th October 1926 in Ljubljana, Slovenia; the first Czech stage performance took place almost twenty years later, on 26th July 1943 in Pilsen. The staged production of The Diary of One Who Disappeared prepared for the Janáček Brno 2020 festival at the Mahen Theatre is based exactly on the directorial instructions that were left in the notes to the work by the author himself.

Author: Patricie Částková

The programme explores the various ways in which the concept of folk music and culture affected the work of composers at the beginning of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Kryštof Mařatka (born in 1972) is one of our most respected contemporary composers, even in the international context. He has been reflecting the folk music of various nations around the world in his compositions for many years, and he works with this material in a remarkable way. His piano composition Onyrik from 2013 evokes the atmosphere of a distant, incomprehensible world, being written for a “slightly de-tempered” piano: the author creates this effect using eight magnetic balls which are positioned on precisely defined strings. This creates a unique sonicity that expands the harmonic possibilities of the instrument, while the unusual harmonic connections that aim towards micro-intervals evoke some kind of dream-like universe.

The work of Béla Bartók (1881–1945) also has its roots in folk music, which the composer also devoted himself to theoretically for many years. The short Allegro Barbaro is Bartók´s first piano composition; at the same time, it represents a fundamental revolution in his work. The whole of it is based on rhythms, which are approached in an original way thanks to surprisingly used accents. The dynamics are also marked by high degree of contrast – passages which are almost inaudible and moments which are very loud can be found right next to each other.

The composition Piano-Rag-Music by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) from 1919 is equally iconic. After leaving Russia for Paris, Stravinsky became interested in American jazz, first through scores brought to him from America, and later from live performances. It is from this period that Piano-Rag-Music comes. The author used the very popular ragtime style here, but changed it completely. Certain rhythmical and harmonic fragments were taken from ragtime and mixed together with Stravinsky´s typical ostinato and with accentuation in shifts, and with bitonality at certain moments. The result is a work which is unusually lively and fascinating to listen to.

The music of Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) also has its roots in folk musical expression, but this aspect is rather latent in the piano cycle In the Mists. Janáček finished the composition in April 1912. Not long before, in 1910, he had moved with his wife and housekeeper to a new house in the garden of the Brno organ school. There, hidden from the world, with broken self-confidence and filled with melancholy, he composed his last more extensive work for solo piano. He worked on it shortly after listening to piano compositions by the French composer Claude Debussy, and it is thus no coincidence that Janáček´s dreamy and melancholic work displays elements of musical impressionism. The cycle In the Mists won the first prize in the composers´ competition of the Club of Friends of Art, which was supposed to publish the winning work. However, Janáček left this opportunity to have a composition printed to his pupil Jaroslav Kvapil, who took second place in the competition. The cycle In the Mists was performed for the first time by Marie Dvořáková in Kroměříž on 7^th December, 1913.

Author: Jiří Zahrádka