Prague.(International - Martin Smolka's Nagano celebrates the drama of Olympic competition)(Opera Review)

Olympic sports are so full of passion, pain and glory, it is a wonder that nobody made an opera about an underdog team winning a gold medal before Martin Smolka's spectacular Nagano, or Hockey in Opera, or The Island of Hockey-do, commissioned by Prague's National Theatre (seen May 5).

Smolka and his co-librettist Jaroslava Dusek turn a wry, surrealist eye on the victory of the Czech hockey team at the 1998 Olympics in the Japanese city that gives the opera its name, creating a fantasia dotted with unexpected bits of poetry. Between testosterone-infused grunts in locker-room workouts ("Do-re-me-fa-sola-ti-goal!") and on the ice (three matches with the USA, Canada and Russia are reenacted), the jocks on the team are given to tender, haiku-like musings such as "Our guileless innocents fall into the penalty box like pears, like nuts, like snow," and "I am stabbed by the darts of the unknown woman's glances; she catches me in the nets of her eyes." An almost religious presence, deified goalkeeper Dominik Hasek, cast as a countertenor, sings only in Latin.

The opera begins hyper-realistically, with the team arriving at the theater like latter-day gladiators (actually driving up to the Estates Theatre's stage entrance in automobiles, captured by a video camera and projected above the audience's beads), and ends with a surreal scene in which a team member faints when Juan Antonio Samaranch, head of the Olympic committee, preoccupied with his hotel accommodations and dinner plans, passes him over at the awards ceremony; he then has a dream in which Hacek is given ...