The opening performance of the 2021/2022 season is an intertwining of collaboration between all our theatre's ensembles, with which its authors aim to highlight the sharp musical-scenic contrast of the setting's conceptual design.

The exceptional pieces by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky belong to the author's classicist period. Although they were created one after the other, they are the exact opposite in terms of content and composition; Stravinsky feels like a genuine compositional chameleon.

The calm, meditative and also light dancing atmosphere of the ballet Apollon Musagète is conjured up by the ballet ensemble, which shares the stage with a somewhat extended string corpus of our theatre's orchestra. Without the usual intermission between the pieces, the story of the gods in the celebrated stage oratorio Oedipus Rex takes us to a man's environment and thus opens questions about his eternal curse and suffering, as well as the fatality of prophetic predictions. In terms of conception, the authors focused primarily on man's captivity in a destiny shaped by gods. No matter how much one desires to be freed from suffering, one is repeatedly caught in a fatal snare until one experiences inner catharsis and finds out the real truth. Cocteau's masterfully written libretto, dramaturgically related to his work
La machine infernale, addresses the audience at its very core, at the point where the protagonists' internal conflict is a reflection of anxiety in the moment of the present. Stravinsky's extraordinary work is musically and scenically reproduced by our orchestra, soloists and an enlarged male chorus.

This encounter of an operatorio and a ballet is also an evening dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the great composer's death. Stravinsky's works are mythical; they are the property of all who sought answers to their questions and thus continued and upgraded many of the composer's ideas about the role and power of music and art.

Marko Hribernihk, Artistic Director of the Opera