THE DIARY OF ONE WHO DISAPPEARED & PIANO RECITAL BY JAN JIRASKÝ

JAN JIRASKÝ’S PIANO RECITAL will take place in the first half of the evening.

Leoš Janáček – In the Mists,

Béla Bartók – Allegro barbaro,

Kryštof Mařatka – Onyrik, future and exotic tales for piano,

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky – Piano Rag Music

In the second part:

LEOŠ JANÁČEK – THE DIARY OF ONE WHO DISAPPEARED premiere of a production based on the author’s stage notes.

Janáček´s song cycle for chamber ensembles The Diary of One Who Disappeared has long been a traditional part of the festival, both in the concert and staged versions, performed by outstanding tenors such as Peter Straka and Aleš Briscein, or the excellent British tenors Toby Spence and Edgar Lyon. The Diary of One Who Disappeared won´t be absent in 2020 either, and one of Slovakia’s leading tenors, Pavol Breslík, will perform the main role in Brno for the first time. Visitors to (for instance) the New York Metropolitan Opera, the Bavarian State Opera or the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden regularly have the opportunity to hear this singer; he also participates in the Salzburg and Edinburgh festivals, in the BBC Proms, and other events.

“In the morning I wander around the garden, in the afternoon I regularly think of several motifs for those beautiful verses about gypsy love. Hopefully a nice musical romance will come out of this – and a piece of that Luhačovice mood will be in it…” Janáček wrote in a letter to Kamila Stösslová, a lady he met in Luhačovice in the summer of 1917. The young woman became Janáček’s last great love and the inspiration for his masterpieces. No wonder that under the influence of her bewitching eyes he remembered the column he had cut out from the Lidové noviny newspaper a year earlier. It was a poem named Z péra samoukova by an author who was unknown at that time, and it told of a young village boy who fell in love with a Romani girl, Zefka, and secretly ran away with her. The poem fired Janáček’s imagination and Kamila was transformed into a beautiful Roma in his eyes. Janáček worked on a collection of 22 folk-style poems for two years (eighty years later its author was discovered to be the regional writer and poet Ozef Kalda) in order to transform it into the unique song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared for tenor, mezzo-soprano, three female voices and piano. The first performance took place on 18^th April 1921 at the Reduta Theatre, Brno. It was produced by Janáček´s students – the tenor Karel Zavřel, the alto Ludmila Kvapilová-Kudláčková and the conductor Břetislav Baka­la, who was in charge of the piano score. However, the vivid execution of the songs called for staging. The first was not long in coming – it happened on 27th October 1926 in Ljubljana, Slovenia; the first Czech stage performance took place almost twenty years later, on 26th July 1943 in Pilsen. The staged production of The Diary of One Who Disappeared prepared for the Janáček Brno 2020 festival at the Mahen Theatre is based exactly on the directorial instructions that were left in the notes to the work by the author himself.

Author: Patricie Částková

The programme explores the various ways in which the concept of folk music and culture affected the work of composers at the beginning of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Kryštof Mařatka (born in 1972) is one of our most respected contemporary composers, even in the international context. He has been reflecting the folk music of various nations around the world in his compositions for many years, and he works with this material in a remarkable way. His piano composition Onyrik from 2013 evokes the atmosphere of a distant, incomprehensible world, being written for a “slightly de-tempered” piano: the author creates this effect using eight magnetic balls which are positioned on precisely defined strings. This creates a unique sonicity that expands the harmonic possibilities of the instrument, while the unusual harmonic connections that aim towards micro-intervals evoke some kind of dream-like universe.

The work of Béla Bartók (1881–1945) also has its roots in folk music, which the composer also devoted himself to theoretically for many years. The short Allegro Barbaro is Bartók´s first piano composition; at the same time, it represents a fundamental revolution in his work. The whole of it is based on rhythms, which are approached in an original way thanks to surprisingly used accents. The dynamics are also marked by high degree of contrast – passages which are almost inaudible and moments which are very loud can be found right next to each other.

The composition Piano-Rag-Music by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) from 1919 is equally iconic. After leaving Russia for Paris, Stravinsky became interested in American jazz, first through scores brought to him from America, and later from live performances. It is from this period that Piano-Rag-Music comes. The author used the very popular ragtime style here, but changed it completely. Certain rhythmical and harmonic fragments were taken from ragtime and mixed together with Stravinsky´s typical ostinato and with accentuation in shifts, and with bitonality at certain moments. The result is a work which is unusually lively and fascinating to listen to.

The music of Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) also has its roots in folk musical expression, but this aspect is rather latent in the piano cycle In the Mists. Janáček finished the composition in April 1912. Not long before, in 1910, he had moved with his wife and housekeeper to a new house in the garden of the Brno organ school. There, hidden from the world, with broken self-confidence and filled with melancholy, 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 thus no coincidence that Janáček´s dreamy and melancholic work displays elements of musical impressionism. The cycle In the Mists won the first prize in the composers´ competition of the Club of Friends of Art, which was supposed to publish the winning work. However, Janáček left this opportunity to have a composition printed to his pupil Jaroslav Kvapil, who took second place in the competition. The cycle In the Mists was performed for the first time by Marie Dvořáková in Kroměříž on 7^th December, 1913.

Author: Jiří Zahrádka