What contemporary music must not be missed at Prague Spring 2024?
Music beyond the limits of the possible – this is how the program dedicated to contemporary art can be briefly characterized as part of this year’s international music festival Prague spring. Within the series Prague Offspring the British composer will present herself Rebecca Saunders or an Austrian ensemble Klangforum Wien in the lead with Enno Poppem. The song of the deceased last year will be played Kaiji Saariah, but also new compositions by five Czech and Slovak composers. You will hear the world premiere of concerts Kryštof Mařatka and Sylvie Bodorová. Project Pianophony sounds the individual parts of the piano using electronics. 11,000 strings in a monumental composition Georg Friedrich Haas surrounds you fifty microtonally tuned pianos and chamber orchestra. The festival itself will end European premiere new songs Superorganisms Miroslav Srnka in submission Czech Philharmonic under the baton of the famous David Robertson.
Prague Offspring: in the shoes of Rebecca Saunders, tribute to Kaaij Saariahjo, three-year residency at Klangforum Wien
Prague Offspring, a series dedicated to the most current trends in contemporary music, is taking place for the third time this year. “The basic starting point was to create two intensive days that would be completely dedicated to contemporary music,” explains festival dramaturg Josef Třeštík. You can immerse yourself in a program full of concerts, workshops and master classes with internationally recognized artists in days May 31 and June 1 at the Center for Contemporary Art DOX.
The role of the resident ensemble will be played by the Klangforum Wien for the third and last time this year. After Olga Neuwirth and Georg Friedrich Haas, she will present herself as a resident artist Rebecca Saunders, a British author living in Berlin. Several of her compositions will be performed by the Austrian ensemble, including probably the most famous, Scar. She will perform as a soloist in the composition Nether a phenomenal British soprano Juliet Fraser.
Prague Offspring will also remind the Finnish composer Kaiju Saariah, June 2nd marks exactly one year since her death. “Although the festival program was already almost set at that time, we decided together with Klangforum Wien to include the composition Solar as a tribute to her memory,” adds Josef Třeštík. We will also hear the premiere of five new ones compositions by Czech and Slovak authors and authors, created especially for Klangforum Wien. They composed them Timea Urban Hvozdíková, Michal Jindrák, Martin Klusák, Michal Wróblewski and Matej Sloboda.
Discussions, workshops and master classes form an essential part of the Prague Offspring program. During “reading lessons”, composition students can experience with the audience what it looks like when a top ensemble reads a new piece for the first time on their own pieces. They will receive valuable feedback from musicians who have been making this kind of music for decades. chooses one author, weir gets the order to a new track for the next edition of Prague Offspring. “This is key to artistic growth as it gives young composers who have not yet had the opportunity to work with such a prestigious ensemble the opportunity to develop their skills,” states Třeštík. There will also be a continuation of the “How to Spring Off” discussion series, in which Miroslav Srnka will ask Peter Paul Kainrath from Klangforum Wien and Christian Fausch of Ensemble Modern to the challenges of presenting contemporary music.
Pianofonia: piano as you’ve never heard it before
He looks at the project with an unusual view of the piano Pianophony Michal Rataj and Jan Trojan. The pair of composers will hear and sound the individual parts of the instrument on May 20 at the National Technical Museum. “The piano is an instrument of Western musical culture. However, its deeper instrumental essence connects much more within itself.” Michal Rataj describes the project. The concert grand piano, as we know it from classical concerts, will be played by a leading Czech performer of world renown Ivo Kahanek. The piano will be playing unusually Michal Nejtek, himself a recognized music composer, whose music was also heard at the Prague Spring in the past, and who as a performer has overlaps with jazz and rock. A percussionist of extraordinary sensitivity will play piano parts as percussion instruments Stephen Hon. Their playing will be recorded by microphones, and with the help of surround sound, both authors will transform everything into a piano symphony – Pianophony. The event is taking place on the occasion of the exhibition dedicated to the 160th anniversary of the founding of PETROF, held from April 10, 2024 to January 31, 2025 in the large exhibition hall of the National Technical Museum.
Kryštof Mařatka’s prehistoric musical archetypes and Sylvia Bodorová’s trumpet celebration
For a long time, the festival has given contemporary Czech music a prominent place even at concerts with classical repertoire, thereby emphasizing its irreplaceable role in the musical world. And so neither A year of Czech music Prague Spring is celebrated not only through authors from ancient chapters of music history.
“The festival proudly supports contemporary Czech composers whose names are perhaps better known abroad than in our country – similarly, as was the case with today’s famous names in earlier times.” says the festival director Pavel Trojan. The Prague Spring therefore invited Orchester Philharmonique de Radio France, to perform the world premiere of Kryštof Mařatka’s violin concerto in addition to French music at their concert on May 27. It has a mysterious name Sanctuary – in the depths of the cave paintings citing inspiration from prehistoric paintings preserved in caves for tens of thousands of years. “Prehistoric art represents the basic human need to create and leave a mark. And that is the essence of our work,” says the composer, whose grandfather Josef was a close collaborator August Family. The French violinist Amaury Coeytaux will perform as a soloist, and the piece will be conducted by Mařatka himself.
The program of this year’s festival will also be enriched by the premiere of the composition Trumpet Ceremony Sylvie Bodorová for trumpet and orchestra. He will guide her Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the festival competition. You will hear a Hungarian trumpet player in the solo part Gábor Boldoczky.
Hear the unheard
The grand finale of the three-year Klangfora Wien residency will be the performance of the work 11,000 strings from Georg Friedrich Haas, June 2 at the Karlín Forum. You will hear in a unique evening fifty microtonally tuned pianos arranged in a circle, supplemented by a chamber ensemble – totaling exactly 11,000 strings. The audience will be located both inside and outside the circle. The track, characterized by fascinating sound effects, gives the impression of electronic music in some places, even though everything is fully acoustic.
Georg Friedrich Haas returns to Prague after last year’s residency at the Prague Offspring. The Austrian author is counted among living classics and one of the most important creators of micro-interval music today. He does not avoid political and social topics and together with his wife, writer, performer and BDSM coach By Mollena Williams-Haas expresses himself in his works on topics such as sexuality, alcoholism and the Nazi history of Austria.
Miroslav Srnka’s superorganisms
The final concert of the Prague Spring on June 3 in the Rudolfinum will offer essential works of Czech music performed Czech Philharmonic under the baton David Robertson as Josef Špaček as a soloist. It will be heard in the European premiere here Superorganisms Miroslava Srnka, a piece commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the NHK Symphony Orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic and the Orchester de Paris. He, led by Klaus Mäkelä, will soon present it in Paris as well. The composition consists almost exclusively of solo voices of a completely individually divided orchestra, but nevertheless the individual voices are difficult to distinguish from each other. “The music in them only arises from the ripples of common energy,” adds Srnka, saying that it was created in a time that will not be able to solve its problems without the help of the human superorganism.
About the Prague Spring Festival
In almost eighty years (founded in the spring of 1946), the Prague Spring International Music Festival has established itself as one of the world’s most respected classical music festivals. Rafael Kubelík, one of the most important conductors of classical music of the 20th century, was responsible for the birth of the festival. The international debut of the later famous conductor Leonard Bernstein took place in the very first year. Since 1947, the Prague Spring International Music Competition has also become a permanent part of the festival. Every year, the festival brings to five dozen concerts – visiting foreign artists and orchestras, the best performers of the domestic scene, artistic legends and outstanding talents at the beginning of their artistic career.
An important element of the festival is the breadth of dramaturgical scope – the range of concerts ranges from medieval music to works by living authors. The Prague Spring is a platform on which Czech classical music and Czech performing arts meet regularly, on a large scale and at a high level, with the foreign scene, thus freeing themselves from the grip of locality and subjecting themselves to strict standards of true worldliness. It is no less important, that the Czech listener and viewer primarily benefits from this synergy, who becomes an oriented, knowledgeable and demanding cultural customer. Thanks to their participation in the festival, foreign artists come across the music of Czech authors, to a large extent also contemporary ones, through whom these works spread further around the world.
A discounted season ticket for the Prague Offspring concert series can be purchased here: https://festival.cz/vse-o-vstupenkach/permanentka-prague-offspring/
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