For the seventh time, the multi-genre music festival Brno Music Marathon proved that with precise organization and a little luck, an astonishing amount of music can be packed into one long weekend. From Thursday to Sunday (11-14 August), selected music halls, squares, courtyards, and city streets were filled with the artistic creations of countless bands, ensembles, and specific musical groups of all genres and styles. Lovers of rock, world music, jazz, artistic music, folklore, and improvised music were in for a treat. However, this year’s edition differed from the previous one in one crucial respect: 2022 introduced the first ever artist in residence of the festival, the violinist, flautist, and pianist Anna Fusek.
Two things set the Brno Music Marathon apart from most traditional festivals. Since this is a multi-genre festival, the resident artist is expected to perform in a variety of musical positions. Moreover, all of this has to be accomplished within a crucial limit of four days. For visitors, the “marathon” consisted mostly in trying to attend as many concerts, jam sessions, busking rooms, and dance performances as possible. For Anna Fusek, however, the festival represented daily performances, both in classical music and jazz or world music.
While the first concert featured an imaginary dialogue between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the English Renaissance composer Thomas Morley, staged by Anna Fusek and violinist Mayah Kadish, the very next evening the artist in residence, alongside Gianluca Geremia, presented a combination of Renaissance and Baroque music with 20th century music. The concerts that did not fall into the artistic music category made up a completely separate chapter – an evening with the band La Cosmologie de la Poire combining classical music, jazz, and world music techniques in their original works and the final concert with Anna Fusek, singer Simona Gatto, and the band Aquaverde in the rhythms and melodies of Brazilian music.
This list alone gives an idea of the wide range of styles that Anna Fusek is involved in. What is not obvious, however, is the interpretative adaptability and variety with which as an instrumentalist she approaches each style. While in classical music she consistently sticks to historically informed interpretation and makes sure that ornamentation and phrasing correspond to period practice, in jazz or world music she chooses to work much more freely with tone color, expressiveness, and dynamics, regardless of whether she’s playing flute, violin, or piano. Her improvisational abilities, which shine the brightest in non-artificial music and which, among other things, prove how closely Anna Fusek has developed a close connection with this kind of music, also deserve great attention. Would she have achieved greater technical perfection if she had concentrated on just one instrument? Almost certainly, but at the same time she would have lost the unique mode of self-expression that runs throughout her instrumentation. This mode is evident not only in her interpretation of classical music, but especially in her performances with both La Cosmologie de la Poire and Aquaverde. And the icing on the cake: in terms of a multi-genre festival, one can hardly find a better candidate for the post of artist-in-residence. Not only because of her interpretive skills, but because of the authenticity of all the musical positions that her playing leads her into.
All this, however, raises quite fundamental questions – how much further can we go? Who will be able to outdo these everyday concerts in the next year in different performance styles, on several instruments, and how? This pace need not be kept up at all costs, of course, but Anna Fusek, whether she meant to or not, has set a course for the upcoming artists-in-residence that practically perfectly embodies several fundamental ideas of the Music Marathon. Next year’s series will undoubtedly present a considerable challenge for the organizers and the artist-in-residence. However, it is precisely these challenges that constantly push the musical life of Brno (and others) forward. We can only look forward to the 2023 Music Marathon.
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