Lubor Cukr

Lubor Cukr was born in Prague. Since 1999 he has worked at the Prague State Opera as assistant stage director. He has collaborated with Heinz Lukas-Kinderman, Gilbert Blin, Paul-Émile Fourny, Daniel Mesguich, Arnaud Bernard, Nathan Datner, Philippe Godefroid, David Pountney, Roman Hovenbitzer, Yoshi Oida, Karel Drgáč, and Anton Nekovar. He has likewise worked with the Opéra de Nice: with Gilbert Blin on Vivaldi’s Rosmira Fedele (2003) and Handel’s Teseo (2007), with Jean-Claude Riber for Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos (2004), and with Olivier Bénézech for Mozart’s Idomeneo (2004) and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (2005), this last production being also staged at the Opéra de Toulon (2007). In 2008, he joined Gilbert Blin in mounting a semi-stage production of Scarlatti’s oratorio La Giuditta, with the participation of the Ensemble Baroque de Nice, a project which made a successful tour of several music festivals in France during the summer of 2009.

Figuring on the list of Lubor Cukr’s commissions as stage director are productions of, among others, the contemporary opera by J.F. Fischer, The Games (2003), for the Prague festival “Opera 2003”, Benjamin Britten’s The Little Sweep (2005) for Children’s Opera Prague, using his own translation and texts in Czech. In the year of the anniversary of W. A. Mozart (2006), he staged a historically informed reconstruction of Don Giovanni for the company Opera MozArt. This production was presented in 2006, 2007 and 2008 at the Estate Theatre in Prague. In 2008 he staged a new production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro for the Opéra de Nice. Elsewhere, he staged a production of Puccini’s Tosca for the Opera Week in Kutná Hora, and at the Prague State Opera has to his credit the revival of Dominik Neuner’s 1992 production of Verdi’s Otello (2009). He made his debut as stage director in the field of musical with a production of Dáma na kolejích (“Streetcar Lady”) at the J.K. Tyl Theatre in Plzeň. His third encounter with the legacy of W.A. Mozart took him to the Silesian Theatre in Opava, where he staged the opera La Clemenza di Tito (2010). In 2003 Lubor Cukr became a member of the Académie Desprez, a cultural institution affiliated to Stockholm’s Drottningholms Slottsteater.