Pavol Kubáň

Can the darkest moments of life also lift our souls? Drawing on his own experience in a Siberian prison in the company of misfits, murderers and theives, Dostoevsky was inspired to write his novel Notes from a Dead House, telling his brother at the time: ‘Believe me, there were among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often gave me great joy to find gold under a rough exterior.’ In Janáček’s hands, Dostoevsky’s inspiration and the raw material drawn from an appalling world of incarceration find an even more powerful form of expression in his last opera, From the House of the Dead. Unfettered by conventional story-telling, Janáček wrote his own libretto, freely weaving together a series of stories of everyday prison life and of the fates of individual convicts.

Platée, a silly and conceited nymph, falls for a fake wedding to Jupiter, king of the gods. This new staging of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Baroque masterpiece is colourful, eccentric, full of wit and free of taboos, yet also surprisingly deep. Filmed 1st june 2025 at Czech National Theatre, Prague

The insatiable Don Giovanni is not picky: anyone will do, from Donna Elvira to her maid and the bride at a country wedding. But when one of his conquests ends in murder, he sets off a chain of events that takes him forever closer to his bitter fate. For the first time, Prague’s Estates Theatre, where Don Giovanni premiered some 230 years ago, calls on a director from overseas to stage Mozart's opera. Will Alexander Mørk-Eidem’s new production break with its long tradition of the famous rake’s last day? Is his Giovanni an incorrigible slave to his instincts? Is he a provocateur? Or a mere catalyst around whom Mozart thoroughly depicts the constantly changing universe of female emotions?