Svadba (Wedding)

Opera for 6 female voices a capella

The premiere will take place in Private Philarmonia «Triumph» (Lenina, 44)

Ana Sokolović rose to fame as a composer in Canada, having moved there from the Serbian capital in the early 1990s. Having left her homeland, she not only maintained her connections with Serbian culture but managed to strengthen them yet further. Various forms of artistic expression are merged within Ana Sokolović’s music. Her pieces are deep, while at the same time light-hearted; they transport you to a vibrant, fantasy world often inspired by folk music from the Balkans with its asymmetric rhythms of a never-ending feast. The winds of change, which brought Sokolović from Europe to America, have made her one of the most prominent figures of the musical world.

Among her most significant recent works is Svadba (Wedding) ― the second opera composed by Ana Sokolović. It is an a cappella opera for four soloists ― four sopranos and two mezzo-sopranos. The plot is based on the Serbian ritual of female relatives and friends preparing a bride for her wedding.

The world premiere of Svadba was staged in June 2011 at the Berkeley Street Theatre in Toronto. The press applauded it as the «musical discovery of the year»:

«Svadba — Wedding, Ana Sokolović’s a cappella opera that begins in the ordinary world and ends in a magical realm» (Jon Kaplan, Now Magazine).

«Svadba is a story without a narrative. It is a direct musical experience. It is a vibration that connects the stage with the audience. It is a human voice which of its own accord and within itself brings together sound and emotion on a level each and every one of us can comprehend. The exchange between the performers and the audience takes place at the most profound level, one where linguistic barriers and other boundaries are absent» (Operatoronto’s Blog).

The opera’s European premiere took place in 2015 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. In 2017 it will be performed in Russia for the first time.

Anton Adasinsky is directing the performance of the opera in Perm. In the early 1990s, his physical theatre company (group) DEREVO ― founded in the late 1980s ― shaped the post-perestroika image of Saint Petersburg theatre. In October 2016 Anton Adasinsky staged the high-profile production Osip Mandelstam. Wolfhound Age together with a troupe from Moscow’s GOGOL Centre and starring Chulpan Khamatova, making audiences shudder from the virtual physical impact of the sound of the poetry. In the Perm production of Svadba the director once again focusses on the convergence of verbal and physical theatre. The space where they overlap becomes the performance space in which the word is duplicated by the movement while onstage, opera singers and contemporary dancers rub shoulders with one another.

«Sokolović’s Svadba is a hymn to the Woman’s hopes.
They are not to be.
And in the little two-story greenhouse, time gets mixed-up.
Above are the Notes, Throats and struggles of the opera divas to pitch a D natural. Below is our very life, running along the wretched rails of time.
From the damp phone booth and „where the hell have you been?“ to the wedding trap.
And that is the dance of the five barriers of life. Five girls.
Childhood, youth, WEDDING, life and… through a life spent chained to the kitchen sink and faith in tomorrow to the encounter of herself as a dinky, sinewy old woman.
But children remember their mother, and their mother ― the miracle of children forever, but as for what becomes of husbands and heroes ― this is a question put to me as a director.
The rest is on stage».