Jan Ondráček

Biography

Tenor Jan Ondráček is a regular guest of the National Theatre Opera. He first appeared at the National Theatre in 1999 as the Ringmaster in Smetana‘s The Bartered Bride and a year later he made his debut at the Prague State Opera as Peter Quint in the Czech premiere of Britten‘s The Turn of the Screw.

At the National Theatre and the State Opera he has created more than two dozen operatic characters – for example Abdallo (Verdi: Nabucco), Monostatos (Mozart: Die Zauberflöte), Remendado (Bizet: Carmen), Goro and Yamadori (Puccini: Madama Butterfly), Benvolio (Gounod: Roméo et Juliette), Parpignol (Puccini: La bohème), Gaston (Verdi: La traviata) and others. At the North Bohemian Theatre in Ústí nad Labem he sang Jeník in Smetana‘s The Bartered Bride, Šťáhlav in Libuše, Tamino in Mozart‘s Die Zauberflöte, the Young Sailor and the Shepherd in Wagner‘s Tristan und Isolde and Belmonte in Mozart‘s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, for which he was shortlisted for the 2016 Thalia Award. His repertoire also includes operetta roles such as Paris (Offenbach: La belle Hélène), Camille de Rosillon (Lehár: Die lustige Witwe), Edwin (Kálmán: Die Csárdásfürstin) and Adam (Zeller: Der Vogelhändler). He has also been a guest at opera houses in Pilsen, České Budějovice, Liberec and Opava. He has participated in several tours of Japan with Czech opera companies. In 2012 he was a guest at the Gerhart Hauptmann-Theater in Görlitz, Germany.

At the National Theatre in Prague, he collaborated on the educational programmes. He performed Janáček's Our Father in Switzerland and Dvořák‘s Stabat mater in Germany. He participated in the recording of Peri‘s opera Euridice for Czech Radio and recorded a solo part in Britten‘s opera The LIttle Sweep with the Prague Children‘s Opera. In addition to his singing activities, he is engaged in linguistic and phonetic consultancy for the German language with a focus on opera singing.

Photo: Peter Paleček