Davor Vincze's new opera
This Saturday, February 10, in Gelsenkirchen near Cologne, Germany, the Musiktheater im Revier premieres a new opera, NOperas! - Freedom Collective, by our world-renowned composer, Davor Vincze, who is also one of the three artistic directors of the Zagreb Music Biennale. This is the result of his victory last year at the feXm (Fonds experimentalles Musiktheater) competition, to which he applied together with his team: director (Heinrich Horwitz), librettist (Aleksandar Hut Kono), conductor (Premil Petrović), video artist (Rosa Wernecke ) and costume and set designer (Magdalena Emmerig). As often happens in European institutions, the Theater Bremen and the Staatstheater Darmstadt, where this opera will be performed after the premiere, entered into a partnership with the producer, feXm. Each of the three theaters has programmed three performances, so it is expected to be shown as many as nine times between February and June this year, which is a substantial number of performances for a contemporary opera.
One of the main conditions of the competition was that the work in the form of musical theater, or opera, be innovative in every aspect of the complete work of art - in the field of music, direction, text and scene. The composer introduces the ChatBot software application for additional clarifications and details about the story and the characters on stage, before and after the performance, as well as the smartphones themselves to generate music during the performance. This is an almost complete Croatian story because the librettist is a writer and the first Croatian graduate librettist, Aleksandar Hut Kono, who lives in London and was inspired to work on the libretto by the simplicity of today's chat communication, so the entire libretto is woven from short phrases. Video artist Rosa Wernecke expands the recorded scenes with artificial intelligence tools, adding multiple perspectives. In his concept, director Heinrich Horwitz uses the choir as an intermediary in the communication between the audience and the performer and erases the boundary between the viewer and the performer.
The narrative is set in the Freedom Collective – a futuristic, imaginary virtual world that entertains; from parties to boxing, drugs, and all you can imagine. In it, we follow a middle-aged couple, Fan and Karla, who guide us through this virtual underground complex. After years of being lulled into the same "rotten scheme" in which he, as a former boxer, and she, as a pharmacist-nutritionist, deceive young boxers with the hope of international success. They, in fact, only use them for their doping tests, as they find an escape from the entanglements of life in love affairs with young scientist Zsuzsa and young boxer Andrej. However, things do not quite go according to plan, and as everything takes place online, the question arises whether this story happened at all or is just a figment of imagination created in virtual reality.
This is Davor Vincze's first full-length musical theatre project in which he is the sole music author, and we wish him much success with his first complete opera!