MEDIATHEK

Octavia. Trepanation, an opera by Dmitri Kourliandski, was created in the year of the centenary of the Russian revolution as a response to the need to reflect upon the nature of power. The director and the composer define the work’s genre as an "opera-operation." The essence of this operation is the trepanation of revolution: by means of their artistic gesture this production’s creators dismiss the source of bloody tyranny and forever invalidate the notion of war.

The musical fabric of the opera consists of four semantic and functional layers. The first layer presents a group of 12 soloists. Traditionally notated in the score, this layer symbolizes power and order. The second layer, a kind of "climate" created by live electronics, is largely unpredictable. It is generated and controlled in real time by sound artist Oleg Makarov. At the heart of the electronic material are the first bars of the revolutionary song "Varshavianka," slowed down 100 times. The third layer features a large chorus, an army of Terracotta soldiers. The choral singers react to the "climate" created by live electronics, and to the material of the soloists, submitting to them and emerging as their shadow, their echo, their live acoustic resonance. Finally, the fourth layer, the symphony orchestra, introduces an element of pure sound abstraction. The opera’s libretto is based on two texts: the play Octavia, attributed to Seneca, and fragments of Lev Trotsky’s essay about Vladimir Lenin.