I love trees that have been growing for thousands of years… Does time pass around us or do we pass through time? Are there people among us who can create their own internal time that lasts for ages? Orlando or Orlando, what does it matter to name an identity, what others judge and feel the need to label, when the only important thing is freedom in our heart and soul. This is the only way we can walk through time and see…
Another new opera work is commissioned for the ensemble of the Janáček Opera NdB. Its author is the excellent Slovak composer Lubica Čekovská, who is no newcomer to the world of opera, and her last opera Impresario premiered at the Bregenz Festival. The inspiration for the libretto was the fascinating novel Orlando by the English writer Virginia Woolf - a literary journey across the centuries, from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to 1928, with the young nobleman and poet Orlando.
The opera takes us to the courtroom where it is decided whether Orlando is a woman or a man. Through individual testimonies, we look into the turning points in Orlando's life. The loss of the first great love, the search for solitude and a new identity, a mysterious dream revealing the thin line between life and death. Orlando loves, creates and changes, and the opera here pays tribute to the liberating power of imagination and art, as well as the ability to perceive the present moment.
