Jaroslav Ježek: Wind Quintet
Leoš Janáček: Wind Sextet "Youth", JW VII/10
Gideon Klein: Divertimento for wind octet (conductor: Vít Spilka)
The matinee will recall the tradition of Sunday morning concerts in this theater, in which Leoš Janáček also took part. And also the deep tradition of wind harmonies, which were an integral part of the life of the Augustinians in Staré Brno, where Janáček grew up. However, the matinee program is focused exclusively on twentieth-century music.
Leoš Janáček (1854–1928) gave himself the wind sextet Mládí for his seventieth birthday. In the composition, he returns to his youth in Hukvaldy and Old Brno. The remarkable cast also relates to the memories of wind harmonies popular at the time in the Augustinian Abbey in Staré Brno, with which Janáček's childhood and youth are inextricably linked. In the third part, we can follow the composer's musical memory of the Prussian-Austrian war, when the Prussians occupied Staré Brno in 1866, and little Leoš was the only one of the founders to stay in the monastery and experience these events directly.
The music of Jewish composers is also an integral part of our culture. One of the most remarkable is certainly Gideon Klein (1919–1945), who, although he was murdered by the Nazis at the age of only twenty-five, left a respectable body of work reacting not only to the Second Viennese School, but clearly also to the work of Leoš Janáček. He wrote Divertimento in 1939-40, i.e. before the deportation to Terezín, but already in the terrifying reality of the persecution of the Jewish population. All this is reflected in this unusual composition.
Jiří Zahrádek
