The Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno is awarding the Austrian actor and opera director Otto Schenk and honorary doctorate. The ceremonial assembly will take place in the Divadlo na Orlí aand will be part of this year’s celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts.
The Austrian artist Otto Schenk will be receiving the title Doctor Honorius Causa as the fifteenth person that the academy has awarded its highest award. Schenk will be receiving the award for his contributions to Czech music. “I am particularly gratified to be receiving an honorary doctorate from the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno; this extraordinary award has come from an institution from which I did not expect nor have any right to expect anything,” stated Schenk. His productions of Czech operatic works have formed part of the permanent repertoire of foreign opera houses and have helped to promote Czech music abroad.
The eighty-seven-year-old Schenk is a legendary opera director. Shortly after beginning his rich and extraordinary career he began to stage the operas of Leoš Janáček. The first of his works that he directed was Jenůfa in 1964, which at the same time was his first production with the Vienna State Opera. Since that time he has been happy to return to the works of this composer. “Otto Schenk and Leoš Janáček have given each other much. And they have given us even more,” notes the dean of the Music Faculty at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts, Profesor Jindřich Petráš. The most recent Czech work for Otto Schenk was Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen at the Vienna State Opera in 2014. Of this production, much praised by critics and audiences, the director recalled: “Janáček was always like a father to me. With him I both began and ended in the Vienna State Opera.”
Aside from Janáček Schenk has directed for example Smetana’s Bartered Bride (1982). His legendary, highly successful staging of Dvořák’s Rusalka (1987) with a Czech team, with excellent performances from the conductor Václav Neumann, Gabriela Beňačková as Rusalka and Peter Dvorský as the Prince, was transferred to the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2014. The cast included world-class stars such as Renée Fleming and Piotr Beczala. This patron of the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts adds that you cannot help but fall in love with Janáček. Otto Schenk has worked in the most prestigious opera houses such as the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the Hamburg State Opera, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, London’s Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
The Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno has been awarding the title Doctor honoris causa since 1993. Altogether the globally renowned honorary doctorate elevates the image of not only domestically but also the international prestige of the academy. In the series to date it has always been about extraordinary theatre performers or musicians. “We are fully convinced that Otto Schenk fully deserves to receive this highest award our Alma Mater can give,” stated the rector of the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts, Professor Ivo Medek.
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