Once every season, the Prague National Theatre dusts off an opera from its archives by a local, usually unheralded composer, and gives it star treatment. This year it’s a gem: Kolotoč (Carousel) by Václav Trojan, a children’s fable about adventures set in exotic locales in distant lands. Animals are friends, the moon is a watchful guardian and dreams come true in this imaginative lark that is equally charming for adults.
It’s not hyperbole to say that no one but Trojan could have composed this opera. A multi-instrumentalist who graduated from Prague Conservatory in 1927, he played in a number of orchestras and ensembles and worked at various times as an organist at a synagogue, harmonium player at the cinema, coach and musician at a children’s theater, accompanist at a ballet school and jazz piano teacher. He started composing as a teenager and wrote music for film, theater, choral groups, ballets and puppet productions. All those elements and influences come into play in Kolotoč, which offers a phantasmagoria of styles, sounds and characters.
The opera opens at a carnival where a barker encourages children to ride on the carousel. At the end of the day, four of them fall asleep on a horse, duck, auto and airplane that whisk them off to fantastic dreams. Encounters with a gorilla and natives in Africa, kangaroos and gold prospectors in Australia, a white elephant in India and the Hollywood spotlight in America all lead to trouble requiring rescue by an anthropomorphic moon floating above and Dreamer, his helper on the ground. In the morning, the children depart on a joyful note and the barker starts the cycle again.
Director Magdalena Švecová rolls all this out at a rapid clip driven by propulsive music, running a very busy stage teeming with storybook figures: dancing Pygmies, boxing kangaroos, a splendiferous rajah, a sad starlet and no end of carnies in splashy, whimsical costumes. (A cotton candy dress is especially striking.) The full cast is huge – 16 singers and actors, a children’s choir, mixed adult choir, ballet dancers and a gaggle of youngsters as animals and extras – but Švecová keeps the nonstop action flowing smoothly, with an assist from motion coordinator Anton Eliaš. His expertise in mime is particularly effective in the nonspeaking role of Dreamer, played with finesse at the premiere by Radim Vizváry.
The music is, in a word, remarkable. Along with a genius for incorporating and blending all the musical genres mentioned above, Trojan shows himself to be a master of atmospherics, setting scene after scene neatly with just a few bars. His craftsmanship is so skillful that the score is often a narrative in itself, telling a story that parallels or supplements the one onstage. And to call Trojan’s orchestration colorful would be an understatement. It’s like he invented a new musical language with Kolotoč, one that seamlessly incorporates effects like squawking horns and jarring brass into beguiling melodies. Conductor Zbyněk Müller and the National Theatre Orchestra did heroic work at the premiere handling all the technical demands of a tricky score while creating evocative dreamscapes in the many musical interludes.
There is not a lot of room for singers to shine in this opera, but several at the premiere stood out. As the moon, Miloš Horák literally floated above the tumult, singing with both kindness and authority. Richard Samek made a persuasive carnival barker, and Pavla Radostová was radiant as the personification of the carousel. The dreaming ‘children’ were actually adult singers, and among them, Marie Piechaczková made the most of her brief turn as an airplane pilot.
Cast as bit players throughout, the National Theatre Chorus managed to convincingly portray tourists in pith helmets, thieving gold prospectors and other spirited characters while letting loose with vibrant choral outbursts. The Prague Philharmonic Children’s Choir, seated on risers in the loges closest to the wings, added youthful energy with their vocals and a clever break in the fourth wall, reacting to the events onstage. And hats off to Lukáš Šimon for his impressively acrobatic and highly entertaining performance in a gorilla suit.
Trojan worked on Kolotoč over four years, completing it in 1940. The music became popular on radio broadcasts and performed as an occasional orchestral suite, but it was not until 1960 that the opera was actually staged, first in Ostrava and then by a theater troupe as part of the Prague Spring festival. This production – the first by the National Theatre – is long overdue. For both Czechs who know of Trojan’s other work and foreigners coming to it for the first time, this inventive, enthusiastic treatment was well worth the wait.
