Jiří Nekvasil

Jiří Nekvasil (b. in Ostrava, 1962) graduated from Ladislav Štros’s course in opera stage direction at Faculty of Music of the Prague Academy of Music and Performing Arts, a study he combined with taking a parallel extramural course in dramaturgy at the same school’s Faculty of Drama. In 1988 he and stage designer Daniel Dvořák founded an experimental opera ensemble, Opera Furore. Two years later, the two men were made co-managers of the Chamber Opera Prague, a company which was soon thereafter transformed into Opera Mozart. From 1998 he held the posts of artistic director, dramaturge and resident stage director at the Prague State Opera. From 2002 – 2006 he was the head of the Prague National Theatre’s opera company. On January 1, 2010 he took over as the general director of the Moravia-Silesia National Theatre in Ostrava.

In the course of his artistic career he has so far staged over 70 opera and drama productions, for Opera Furore (Faust; Violin on Iron; Andy Warhol; Golem: An Ecstasy of Expressionism), and for Opera Mozart (The Best of Mozart; Figaro? Figaro!; Play Magic Flute; Don Juan Bastien; plus, between 1992 and 1998, a Mozart series during Opera Mozart’s summer seasons at Prague’s Estates Theatre). In the domain of drama, he has staged among other titles the Czechoslovak premiere productions of Leonid Andreyev’s Black Masks and Woody Allen’s Death, as well as productions of, among other plays, Carlo Gozzi’s The Green Bird, Goethe’s Stella and Urfaust, Ödön von Horváth’s Judgment Day, Shakespeare’s Pericles, and Strindberg’s A Dream Play. At the National Theatre in Prague, he mounted a programme of contemporary opera featuring Jan Klusák’s Academy Report, and Michael Nyman’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1997); John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer (2002), Janáček’s The Excursions of Mr Brouček (2003) and Jenůfa (2005), a stage production of Verdi’s Requiem (2004), Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur (2004), Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (2004) and The Secret (2006), Martinů’s The Greek Passion (2006), Josef Mysliveček’s Antigone (2006), Mozart’s Don Giovanni (2006), and Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (2007). He co-wrote, with composer Aleš Březina, and staged the “opera-trial” Tomorrow There Will Be… (2007), a work dedicated to the famous mezzo Soňa Červená, which was mounted on the stage of the National Theatre’s Divadlo Kolowrat studio platform in April 2008 (the project was subsequently acclaimed as the 2008 Opera Production of the Year, and got five nominations for the Alfréd Radok Award, winning in two of the poll’s categories). In 2009 he staged Martinů’s Juliette and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, both at the Brno National Theatre.

His projects at the Prague State Opera have included world premiere productions of E. F. Burian’s Bubu of Monparnasse (1999), Emil Viklický’s Phaedra (2000), and Trygve Madsen’s Circus Terra (2002), the Czech premiere of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, and productions of Alexander Zemlinsky’s Es war einmal… (2000), and Karel Weis’ The Polish Jew (2001).

Jiří Nekvasil has regularly worked as a stage director on the international circuit. At Trier, he staged the German premiere of Korngold’s Kathrin (1999), Klusák’s Academy Report (2000), and Janáček’s Adventures of the Cunning Little Vixen (2002); at Hamburg, Giuseppe Gazzaniga’s Don Giovanni (2001); at Erfurt, Adriana Lecouvreur (2004); at Regensburg, Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (2005) and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (2009); at Rheinsberg, Mysliveček’s Antigone (2006); and at Rostock, Martinů’s Three Wishes (2007). Elsewhere, he mounted a hugely acclaimed South American premiere of Adventures of the Cunning Little Vixen, at the Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires (2000); the French premiere of Gutlitt’s Soldaten (2002) at Nantes; Verdi’s Nabucco in the USA (2003); The Turn of the Screw and Jenůfa at Riga (2003 and 2005, respectively); The Turn of the Screw at Tallinn (2008); Jenůfa at the Opera Ireland, Dublin (2004); a stage production of Verdi’s Requiem at Tampere (2008); and Dvořák’s Rusalka at the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava, and at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein Duisburg/Düsseldorf (2005 and 2008, respectively).

Apart from his work in theatre, he has been involved for nearly two decades now in directing various formats for Czech Television, including chiefly music programmes (over 130 titles). As a television film-maker, he has dealt largely with 20th century music and musicians, seeking new forms of presenting music drama. He has to his credit close to twenty music documentaries, including two titles devoted to Bohuslav Martinů (Return from Exile; and Martinů and America), and a music film on Ervin Schulhoff (My Teeth Clatter to the Rhythm of Shimmy, 1995), as well as a seven-part documentary entitled Our Countryman, G. M., on Gustav Mahler (2009). He has also directed several operas for television, the most notable of which are, apart from two chamber operas by Josef Berg (The Return of Ulysses; and European Tourism), a project involving two works by Martinů: the “mechanical ballet,” The Amazing Flight, and the opera, Tears of the Knife. Both films won Gold Crystal Awards at the 1999 Golden Prague International Television Festival, and the Grand Prix plus Best Original Direction Award at the 1999 Screen Stage Arts Festival in Brussels. In 2000, he directed a film version of Bohuslav Martinů’s opera, The Voice of the Forest.