Leoš Janáček (1854–1928): Nursery Rhymes, JW V/7 – for 9 voices and 10 instrumentalists

Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959): The Opening of the Wells, H 354

Cantata for soloists, reciter, female or children´s choir and a chamber ensemble

Hans Krása (1899–1944): Brundibár

Children´s opera in two acts with a libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister

Janáček´s playful Nursery Rhymes from 1925 is one of his few compositions that will also appeal to younger listeners. He found inspiration (as he had many times before) in the Lidové noviny newspaper, where nursery rhymes with cheerful drawings by Josef Lada, Ondřej Sekora and Jan Hála were published. Janáček had a whole collection of them at home. He chose eight of them and composed a cycle of compositions for 3 mezzo-sopranos, clarinet, piano and a children´s drum. The premiere took place in the hall of the Besední dům in Brno on 26^th October 1925, and it was a great success. One year later, the composer extended the Nursery Rhymes to contain ten more items. Moreover, he added other voices and instruments to the score and framed them with a short overture and a finale. It is interesting that Janáček wanted colour images to be projected while the composition was being performed but the technology available at the time was insufficient for the execution of his vision. Josef Lada fulfilled Janáček´s wish much later, in 1948, when he made a cartoon based on the Nursery Rhymes together with the director Eduard Hofman. It was Lada´s first experience with animated films. At the concert, Nursery Rhymes will be accompanied by the original film.

The Opening of the Wells is probably the most famous work by Bohuslav Martinů. This is probably due to the artist´s intimate confession of his loneliness and unfulfilled desire to return home, which was denied to him by the Communist regime. It is not surprising that this native of Vysočina longed so much for his home when his last visit to his homeland had taken place in 1938. Perhaps that is why he responded so positively to the text by Miroslav Bureš, a native of Polička, and in 1955 composed this fragile chamber cantata which conveys the listener back to an ancient ritual for welcoming the spring. In Martinů´s work, this custom is intertwined with the wisdom of old age and an understanding of the fate which has awaited all humans for generations untold.

This edition of the festival will once again commemorate a work intended for children who were deported to the Terezín Ghetto during World War II. This time, it will probably be the most famous piece connected with Terezín, the children´s opera Brundibár composed by Hans Krása with a text by Adolf Hoffmeister. The opera was originally created for a competition organized in 1938 by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education. Unfortunately, the events of history unfolded differently and the competition was not evaluated. In 1944, the director of the Prague Jewish orphanage, Otto Freudenfeld, decided to perform the opera. However, the composer himself didn´t take part in the production as he had already been deported to Terezín. Subsequently, Freudenfeld also went to Terezín and he managed to smuggle the piano abstract from the opera into the camp. Krása re-instrumented it again and the famous premiere took place on 23^rd September 1943 in the Magdeburg barracks hall. The opera Brundibár, which is about an oppressor who is defeated by the joint forces of children and animals, gave the audience and the child performers from Terezín a chance to forget for just a moment the horrific world that surrounded them. Needless to say, many of the performers didn´t live to see the end of the war, just like the author of the opera himself, Hans Krása, who was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp in October 1944.

Author: Jiří Zahrádka

An integral part of Janáček´s interests was the support and collection of songs that I call sacred, popular or folk spiritual. Janáček chose to collaborate with (among other people) Hynek Bím in his research into folk songs. Bím’s task was to map western Moravia, and it was Bím who got hold of a collection of old church songs during his repeated collections in the village of Vnorovy. He paid a lot of attention to them despite the fact that they were only a small part of the total number of songs he recorded (as evidenced by the sixteen letters of correspondence between him and Janáček in which he deals with this topic). After all, it was in Vnorovy that Janáček found refuge with his uncle Jan Janáček (who worked as a pastor there from 1870-1878) after his father’s untimely death in 1866. He probably got to know the local spiritual songs in person, as he played the organ at the Vnorovy church gallery during his time there.

The focus of the songs is directly linked to the church year. Some of them can be found in the hymn book Slavíček rájský by Jan Josef Božan from 1719, which was the basic comparative material still used at the Vnorovy parish church services at the time of collection in 1911. Bím wrote down (and partially also recorded on a phonograph) songs for Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter and the celebration of the saints, as well as songs whose content is related to events in Christian life.

The programme “Church songs from Vnorovy” will, at least partially, reveal this still undiscovered pearl of folk music culture which until now has remained off the radar for folk music lovers. The selection of songs will allow us to look back one hundred years at a repertoire deeply rooted in the musical and pious environment of this village in the Slovácko region. A more intimate environment would be suitable for the programme, preferably a religious one. Selected singing soloists, as well as choirs from Vnorovy and its surroundings, perform with an organ, chamber instrument or a capella accompaniment. It might be worth considering making a recording of this exceptional occasion…

Author: Magdalena Múčková

Finnish mythology tells of a mythical artefact called Sampo which ensures the well-being and continuity of the world. Contemporary science can trace the genetic footprint of humans thousands of years into the past via research into the human genome. In the near future, two neuropharmaceutical corporations are competing with each other: one of them manages to combine two achievements: to create a substance that can transfer a person into an ancient myth, and to let them experience the story of their mythical ancestors. However, this may not be as “perfect” in all its truthfulness as the stories we use to shape our identity on social networks today. Is a contemporary person prepared to know the truth about themselves?

The Kalevala is a collection of Finnish – Karelian mythology whose purely oral form was collected during visits to villages by the Finnish physician and linguist Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884). These were individual stories that Lönnrot combined into an epic narrative. The opera S.A.M.P.O. takes The Kalevala as a source of inspiration and updates its motifs and characters to create a story set in the near future. The opera was made to order by the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts for the Janáček Brno festival. It is the first collaboration of both faculties of the Janáček Academy on a project of such a type, and at the same time, it is the opera’s world premiere.

Otto Kauppinen graduated from the Faculty of Theatre, Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts, specializing in theatre dramaturgy. In 2015 -2016 he worked as a dramaturge for Brno’s Divadlo Feste Theatre. In 2017-2018 he worked closely with the Continuo Theatre in Malovice as a dramaturge and director. Otto is half Finnish and is bilingual. He has been translating contemporary Finnish drama into Czech since 2012, and has translated 13 theatre plays so far. He has won, among other things, the first prize at the 2014 Evald Schorm Awards for his translations. He is currently a doctoral student at the Faculty of Theatre, Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts. He presents the topic of his dissertation thesis, the search for a non-hierarchical relationship between the production form and the spectator, at international conferences as well as in professional journals.

Daniel Šimek studied the piano at the Brno Conservatory. In June 2019 he completed his follow-up Master´s degree in composition at the Faculty of Music, Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts. He has been studying orchestra conducting since 2018, and since 2016 he has worked as a piano teacher and accompanist at a music school in Velké Opatovice. He has been a keyboard player in the band Universe B since 2017. In 2018 he became the leader of the Mirror Ensemble, which focuses on contemporary music. He composed the pieces Shapes of Time (2018), Waves (2015), Questioning, and Head Echoes (2016–2019). He has composed music for stage projects as part of Devítka Studio and the Chamber Opera of the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts: Master (2016), the background music for a production of the Magic Flute (2017), and Unknown (2018, performed at the Janáček Brno 2018 festival).

The final concert of the Bamberg Symphony on 16 October will take place in the form of a live stream from the concert hall in Bamberg to our website. Concert without spectators in the theater.

Jakub Hrůša, the Principal Conductor, says: “The participation at the Janáček Brno festival with the Bamberg Symphony in my hometown was the key project of the season for me and my orchestra, in which we invested a lot of effort and emotion during the programme creation and preparation. Unfortunately, the health situation in the Czech Republic has made it impossible to physically get to Brno with the whole orchestra. Yet, of our own initiative and with great understanding of the festival management, we will play for our audience. I am happy that in spite of the adverse circumstances, we have managed to organize a virtual live stream of the concert, unchanged. During our performance in Bamberg, we will give it everything and in our minds we will be with you in the Czech Republic. The timeless music of Leoš Janáček and Richard Strauss will help us bridge the distance.”

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928): Great Suite from the Opera The Cunnning Little Vixen (adapted Jakub Hrůša)

Richard Strauss (1864–1949): An Alpine Symphony, op. 64

This concert by the Bamberger Symphoniker under the leadership of their chief conductor Jakub Hrůša will present the works of two generationally related authors and their perspectives on the countryside, which are very different from one other.

It was probably the fact that such an exceptional composer as Leoš Janáček composed only a few works for the symphony orchestra that led conductors, soon after Janáček´s death, to adapt his opera scores into opera suites which could be performed at symphonic concerts. The first such suite was created from the opera The Cunning Little Vixen by the excellent conductor Václav Talich, but only using music from Act 1. In 2017, the conductor Jakub Hrůša decided to use the purely orchestral passages to create a Grand Suite from the same opera. He was well aware of the fact that orchestral music without singing forms more than a third of the whole piece. He created a suite which follows the plot of the opera chronologically and covers the parts intended for the orchestra. The result is more than excellent and helps us to realize just how distinctive, impressive and engaging the orchestral component of the opera which Janáček composed in 1922-24 is. This extensive orchestral suite will be performed Brno for the first time.

An Alpine Symphony is one of the less frequently performed symphonic poems by Richard Strauss, who composed it during the war years of 1914–15. After his Symphonia Domestica he decided that from then on he would only compose for the opera, but fortunately he didn´t stick to his resolution. He had a beautiful view of the alpine peak Zugspitze and the mighty Wetterstein Mountains from the window of his country house in Garmisch, and he decided to transfer this natural scenery into the score. With the symphony Strauss wished to create an impressive alpine musical panorama describing exclusively visible facts rather than a work exploring our spiritual relationship to nature. His musical painting is an exceptional work: in the score we can find cow bells and at one point the instruments are used to simulate a storm. When the symphony was first introduced in Berlin, the reviewers called it an idyll (just as Janáček called The Cunning Little Vixen a “forest idyll”) and commented on the presence of a certain simplicity or naivety that was unexpected of Strauss. The author himself commented on the work with the words: “For once I wanted to compose like a cow giving milk.”

Author: Jiří Zahrádka

https://www.yumpu.com/cs/document/read/64542108/mfjb-2020-klavirni-recital-jana-bartose

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928): 1. X. 1905 (From the Street, 1st October 1905), JW VIII/19

On an Overgrown Path, series 1, 2, JW VIII/17

Thema con variazioni, JW VIII/6

In the Mists, JW VIII/22

A piano recital by one of the most gifted pianists of the younger generation is always one of the highlights of festival concerts. Jan Bartoš recorded and published Janáček´s complete piano works with Supraphon in 2019, and immediately received accolades from foreign reviewers, such as the prestigious Editor´s Choice award from Gramophone magazine.

The composition 1. X. 1905 (“From the Street, 1st October 1905”) was created spontaneously as a reaction to a tragedy which took place during demonstrations for a Czech university in Brno. After years of efforts to establish a Czech higher education institution in Brno, the government agreed that Brno citizens should be allowed to decide for themselves about whether a Czech university should be created or not. However, as Brno was predominantly German, the German representatives of the city were afraid of Czechs gaining greater influence and so convened a “Volkstag” in Brno on 1st October 1905. German associations and organizations from far and wide were invited to demonstrate their opposition to the foundation of a Czech University in Brno. In response, the Czech citizens of the city organized a large anti-German demonstration. Street fights took place between the two camps, and the police and subsequently also the army were called in. During one of the battles, a young Czech worker named František Pavlík was killed. Filled with impressions from this tragic event, Janáček sat down to write the originally three-movement composition From the Street, I. X. 1905. However, shortly before its premiere on 27th January 1906 he burnt the last movement, and after another performance in Prague he even threw the whole manuscript into the Vltava River. Fortunately, the first performer of the composition, the pianist Ludmila Tučková, kept the original copy and made it public quite some time later, in 1924. Thanks to her, this piano piece, forgotten by Janáček for many years, has been preserved.

The piano cycle of poetic compositions On an Overgrown Path was created gradually during 1900, 1908 and 1911. Janáček wrote the first five compositions of the first series of the cycle in 1900. They were published by a teacher from Ivančice, Emil Kolář, as small compositions for the harmonium in several books for music students entitled Slavonic Melodies. The editor, Jan Branberger, played a role in popularising the cycle when he arranged for the compositions to be printed by a Prague publisher, Bedřich Kočí, in 1908. The interest of publishers in the compositions led Janáček to the creation of other parts, and so the cycle grew to comprise a total of ten pieces, to which the composer assigned poetic titles. On 30^th September 1911, shortly before the first series of the cycle was published by Píša´s publishing house, Janáček released the first composition from a new series of the cycle On an Overgrown Path in the Večery fiction section of the Lidové noviny newspaper, this time without a poetic name. The printed source was based on Sedláček´s undated copy containing a total of three numbered compositions, all without a name, the last of which is basically a sketch that Bartoš, for obvious reasons, did not include in the second series.

Janáček greatly valued the piano compositions Thema con variazioni (or also Zdenka Variations) at the time of its creation, and he even labelled them Opus No. 1, even though he had composed many other pieces before. The creation of this composition dates to the beginning of 1880, i.e. to the period when the composer was studying at the Conservatory in Leipzig. He wrote the piece under the direction of his professor, Leo Grill, and dedicated it to his fiancée Zdenka Schulzová. For the young Janáček it was an important work in which he tested his ability to compose in the style of Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Liszt or Brahms.

Janáček completed his piano cycle In the Mists in April 1912. Not a long time before, in 1910, he had moved to a new house in the garden of Brno’s organ school with his wife and maid, and there, hiding from the world, with broken self-confidence and in a melancholy mood, he composed his last more extensive work for solo piano. He worked on it shortly after listening to piano compositions by the French composer Claude Debussy, and it is no coincidence that his dreamlike melancholic work contains elements of musical impressionism. The cycle In the Mists won the first prize in a contest for composers run by the Club of Friends of Art, which was supposed to publish the winning work. However, Janáček left the opportunity to have a composition published to his pupil, Jaroslav Kvapil, who came second in the contest. In the Mists was played for the first time by Marie Dvořáková in Kroměříž on 7^th December 1913.

Author: Jiří Zahrádka

Charles Ives – Symphony No. 3 „ The Camp Meeting”

Leoš Janáček: Adagio for orchestra

Arvo Pärt – Symphony No. 3

The gallery of the Basilica of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Old Brno was a very significant place for Janáček. He was raised in the Augustinian abbey from the age of 11, sang as a choral scholar in the Old Brno basilica gallery, and subsequently also played the organ there. After Pavel Křížkovský left for Olomouc, Janáček became the director of the choir in 1872.

Autor: Jiří Zahrádka

Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959): String Quartet No. 7, „Concerto da camera“ H 314

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928): Quartet inspired by L. N. Tolstoy´s “Kreutzer Sonata”, JW VII/8

Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904): String Quintet No. 3. in E flat major, Op. 97

The Quartet inspired by L. N. Tolstoy´s “Kreutzer Sonata” dates from 1923. However, the beginnings of the composition date back to 1908, when Janáček composed the now missing Piano trio, inspired by Tolstoy´s novel. Janáček used the musical material from the trio later during the composition of the first string quartet. He dedicated it to the famous Czech Quartet, which performed its premiere on 17^th October 1924. The seventy-year-old author attained great success with this work. For example, in 1925 it was performed at the International Festival of the Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) in Venice.

The String Quintet No. 3 in E flat major is one of the most highly regarded chamber compositions by the world famous Antonín Dvořák. He composed it in 1893 during his stay in America. The piece was created in the immediate vicinity of the String Quartet in F major during his holiday stay in Spillville. It is a work of immense originality inspired by his time in America, and it is characterized by the use of pentatonic, syncopated rhythms and a hint of Indian folklore. At the same time, the composition is very dense and expressive thanks to the extended instrumental composition. The String Quartet had its premiere on 12^th January 1894 in New York, performed by the Kneisl Quartet with Max Zach playing the second viola. The work was first played live in Prague on 10^th October 1894 by the Czech Quartet with Ferdinand Lachner.

Author: Jiří Zahrádka

Leoš Janáček: Pohádka (Fairy Tale) for cello and piano

Leoš Janáček: In the Mists

Leoš Janáček: Youth

For the fourth time, the Faculty of Music of the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts will present a programme prepared by its students at the Janáček festival. The intention is to present – in an unconventional manner – interesting and artistic student activities as well as the individual study specialization areas, which the usual concert visitors are unfamiliar with. The audience will have the opportunity to hear performances by young artists.

Author: Monika Holá

The performance of Salome on 10 October will be replaced by an extraordinary concert of the Orchestra of the Janáček Opera of the National Theatre Brno under the baton of the conductor Robert Kružík with a programme consisting of the works of Leoš Janáček, with a special guest, the exceptional violinist Josef Špaček.

PERFORMING:

JOSEF ŠPAČEK – VIOLIN

MIROSLAV SEKERA – PIANO

ROBERT KRUŽÍK – CONDUCTOR

JANÁČEK OPERA ORCHESTRA NdB

PROGRAM:

LEOŠ JANÁČEK:

JELLOWNESS (INTRODUCTION TO HER SHEPHERD), JW VI / 2

VIOLIN CONCERT OF TRAVELING TUBBLE, JW IX / 10

FOR SOLO VIOLINS AND ORCHESTRA

STRING SUIT, JW VI / 2

SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO, JW VII / 7

LAŠSKÉ DANCE, JW VI / 17