FUAIM Concert - Ostravská Banda - 11/10/24, 1:10pm, Aula Maxima

12 Sep 2024

Happening On 11/10/2024

Ostravská banda

International chamber orchestra
Petr Kotik, conductor

With special guests
Irena Troupová, soprano (Prague)
Susan Stenger, flute (London)
Alex Petcu, percussion (Cork)
Yseult Cooper, violoncello (Cork)

Program:
Martin Smolka - Oh, My Admired C-Minor
Donnchadh MacAodha - Music for Flute and a Two Handed Pianist
Petr Kotik - Many Many Women Plus I
Phill Niblock - Petr’s Charm 

Composers Smolka, MacAodha and Kotik will be present

Friday 11th October 2024 

Formed in 2005 as the resident chamber orchestra for the biennial Ostrava Days, Ostravská banda consists of instrumentalists, often soloists, from Europe and the US whose primary interest is the performance of contemporary music. In addition to Petr Kotík, artistic director of Ostravská Banda, Bruno Ferrandis, Johannes Kalitzke, and Jiří Rožeň will also lead the orchestra this year. The repertoire of Ostravská banda includes major compositions of the 20th century (John Cage, Morton Feldman, György Ligeti, Luigi Nono, Edgard Varèse, and Iannis Xenakis) and works of contemporary composers (Richard Ayres, Petr Bakla, Petr Cígler, Petr Kotík, Bernhard Lang, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Frederic Rzewski, Rebecca Saunders, Salvatore Sciarrino, Martin Smolka, Ana Sokolovic, Miroslav Srnka, Miroslav Tóth, andChristian Wolff). Apart from regular performances at Ostrava Days festivals, Ostravská banda tours and performs at such venues as the Paris Conservatoire, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center (NY), Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Vredenburg Music Centrein Utrecht, Prague Spring Festival, musicadhoy in Madrid, and at NODO (New Opera Days Ostrava), where it serves as the festival’s opera orchestra. Ostravská banda is renowned for its high work commitment and ability to perform even the most complex of 20th and 21st century works. Ostravská banda has also been the inspiration behind various composers’ new pieces. 

Music and ideas that originated during the 1950s in New York – in works by John Cage and his associates – influenced a whole generation of composers and musicians. Prague was one of the first places in Europe where it made an important impact, even though what was then Czechoslovakia was an unlikely place for this to happen: an isolated country behind the Iron Curtain, where keeping in touch with anything coming from the West was difficult and occasionally risky. 

In 1960, when Luigi Nono stopped in Prague on his way from the Warsaw Autumn festival, he met with a few artists and musicians. He gave Petr Kotik the “Darmstädter Beiträge 1958,” a publication documenting the Darmstadt institute and festival. It featured transcripts of lectures by artists-in-residence of that year: texts by John Cage, Edgar Varèse, Christian Wolff and David Tudor. This writing, especially the lectures by Cage, had a great impact on the music and art scene in Prague.  

For some composers there, ideas that came from the New York School were the start of a divergence from the rigid European new music that was long associated with Darmstadt. This new concept of music and art inspired members of the avant-garde scene in Prague to compose in a different way from what was then heard all over Europe. Petr Kotik and Rudolf Komorous soon started to organize an important series of concerts with a repertoire that included works by, among others, Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, and Kurt Schwertsik, as well as their own compositions. 

When John Cage visited Prague in 1964, as part of the Merce Cunningham world tour, he spent an evening with Komorous and Kotik, listening to recordings of their music. He took a great deal of interest in it and said “I am so surprised, I never heard anything like it anywhere.” That year, Cage and Kotik performed together in Vienna, Prague and Warsaw. It was the start of a collaboration between Kotik and Cage that lasted until Cage’s death in 1992. 

Presenting music by Czech composers in the context of music from the U.S. and Europe follows the rationale of this early period from a perspective of the past 60 years. 

https://www.newmusicostrava.cz/en/ostravska-banda/orchestra/