Interviews
Filip Míšek and Ema Brabcová have worked together for as many as twenty years already. They met each other back in 1999 in the group Roe-Deer, as part of which they created their own project called Khoiba. Under this name they released their albums Nice Traps (2004) and Mellow Drama (2007), shone on the domestic scene and drew attention to themselves in neighbouring Germany, but then each of the protagonists set out on their own paths – Filip came up with the solo project Dikolson and Ema was active first in the group Luno and later became part of The Antagonists under the leadership of Jan P. Muchow. Only in January 2019 did the resurrected Khoiba draw attention to itself – first with the single Log and two months later with the album Khoiba. As part of an intensive spring concert the duo is also coming to perform in Brno. The concert will take place in Kabinet múz on 24 April and supporting Khoiba will be Jan Boroš with Čáry života [Life Lines], this year’s winner of the Apollo award. more
The JAZZFESTBRNO Festival is expanding this year with the new Tension programme line, which will feature musicians on the borderline between jazz and electronic music. One of the performers who will appear on 28 March in the Praha space in Brno will be the Czech-Ukrainian duo Zabelov Group, which has recently released a new album called Eg. This interview with Roman Zabelov (accordion, voice, piano, organ, harp…) and Jan Šikl (drums, trumpet, guitar, percussion…) was done in a Prague café just before a rehearsal of the band.
Bára Zmeková is releasing her new album called LUNAVES these days. She will officially present it in Brno as well. The launch of the album will take place in the Kabinet múz on Tuesday 19 March. more
The Slovak group Kiero Grande, two Polish bands and the Brno musician Jan Fic with his solo project progressed from the competition Blues Aperitiv to the international festival Blues Alive in Šumperk. Jan, or Honza as he is informally called, who under the label Red Bird Instruments makes cigar box guitars and other instruments, is otherwise known as the frontman of The Weathermakers, playing their raw blues even at Porta. And in several festivals he appeared as leader of the mock country group The Honzíci. The interview that follows took place on the occasion of the release of the solo album Město (City), which Jan Fic together with the producer Martin Kyšperský officially presented on 17 December in Brno’s Stereo – Vinyl Culture Shop. more
The Cameroonian musician Richard Bona is returning to Brno after a year and a half. While last year the audience in the Janáček Theatre had their breath taken away by his Afro-Cuban project Heritage, this time he is coming with his international group Richard Bona Group. When on 25 November in the Sono Centre we are admiring Bono’s virtuoso guitar playing, it would be good to be aware while he may have inherited his sense of rhythm and general relationship to music from his ancestors, his current level is the result of his hard work. At least this was something he emphasised in our interview, in which we also covered Bono’s love of flamenco and for his club, which he recently opened not far from Paris. more
On Friday 19 October the big band Cotatcha Orchestra performed in HaDivadlo with an important foreign guest: the trombonist, composer and arranger Ilja Reijngoud. After the review of the concert we are now also bringing you an interview with this Dutch jazzman, holder of a Latin Grammy and other significant awards. Reijngoud answered our questions shortly before the Brno concert. more
This week in Prague and Brno the English singer Chris Norman, founding and long-time member of the popular band Smokie, will be performing. His concert in the Brno DRFG Arena will be on Saturday 6 October and he will perform at the Prague Forum Karlín two days earlier. more
The Jazz Groove Brno festival will take place in several venues in Brno from 2 October to 5 December 2018. With its director Josef Buchta we talk not just about this year’s programme but primarily about the new name and the new content of the event, which you can learn more about at groovebrno.cz. more
It is a pity to only read an interview with Marta Kovářová, leader of the groups Budoár staré dámy. Marta is such a personality as a speaker that it is better to hear her. Or also to watch her. But on the other hand, as you will learn from the interview, which took place on the occasion of the 20th birthday of the group, a good song should be able to stand up without a pictorial accompaniment. And perhaps a good narrative will still interest us in written form. more
Jonn Del Toro Richardson: As a guitarist I have to concentrate on myself and not on others
From 30 August to 10 September the blues guitarist from Texas Jonn Del Toro Richardson will be touring the Czech Republic. One of his performances will take place in South Moravia – 2 September in the Strážničan House of Culture in Strážnice. Further concerts will take place for example on 30 August in Valašské Meziříčí, and 7 and 10 September in Ostrava. Jonn Del Toro Richardson has so far released only one solo album (a second is in preparation for 2019), but as a much sought after studio and concert guitarist he has worked with many of the top blues performers. more
On Monday 30 July the guest of Folk Holidays in Náměšť nad Oslavou will be the English singer-songwriter John Smith. The organisers speak of him as a “hidden treasure of exquisite folk singing” and emphasise his album from last year Headlong with its personal confessions to his wife Joanne. We spoke with Smith, who his guitar idol and model John Renbourn called “the future of folk”, by telephone. more
The mandolin player Martin Krajíček plays in various genres of groups. He has his own acoustic trio, is a member of the Jitka Šuranská Trio, plays in the “Mexican” group Mariachi Espuelas and in Cimbal Classica, plays klezmer and also teaches the mandolin. Since last year he has also been the organiser of the Mandolin Festival in Boskovice. This year it will take place from 8 to 10 June. more
This year Miloš Štědroň is taking part as artist in residence at the festival Concentus Moraviae. This was a welcome pretext for an interview. It covered his musical beginnings, his path to a musical education, his artistic development and his famous teachers, his inclination to the legacy of the musical avant-garde as well as why he suddenly kept a certain distance from it, how he dedicated himself to faithful and successful cooperation with the Theatre Goose on a String as well as how he was affected by the political changes of the period, how he overcame their pressure, how he worked with today’s interviewer a banned playwright, how he wrote for the wonderful Due Boemi di Praga, how he taught music and the history of music and worked as a populariser, how he knowledgably interpreted ancient music, but also Leoš Janáček, how he worked as an editor, how he became a significant and famous cultural figure, and not just in Brno, and how all the tasks he set himself in his varied and rich creative life were and are being fulfilled, and the joy he has had from it all. more
Pavel Koudelka, former drummer with the bands Dunaj, Z kopce, Krutnava and Mňága a Žďorp, recently became a member of two new groups. One of them is the drumming duo Zesilovači with Pavel Fajt and the second is Kucharski. In this group he works with musicians known from the Třebíč group FruFru – the vocalist Václav Bartoš, guitarist Vladimír Dudek and bass guitarist Adam Kotrba – and with the keyboard player Víťa Košíček. Kucharski will be giving their first concert on Thursday 17 May in Brno at the Stará Pekárna. more
Julia Ulehla is an American singer, grand-daughter of Vladimír Úlehla, the Moravian musicologist and collector of folk songs and author of the legendary book Živá píseň (Living Song). Together with her husband, the guitarist with Armenian roots Aram Bajakian and former player with Lou Reed and Diana Krall, Julia set up the group Dálava, which works in a non-traditional way with Moravian folk music. They have recorded what is already their second album, The Book of Transfiguration, and we talked about it with Julia and Aram during their recent stay in Brno. more
On Saturday, 24 August, the Korean radio orchestra KBS Symphony Orchestra with its musical director - Finnish conductor and violinist Pietari Inkinen - came to Brno's Špilberk Festival with an exclusively romantic repertoire. The invitation was also accepted by South Korean violinist Bomsori Kim, a graduate of the prestigious Julliard School. more
For a quarter of a century now, the Brno Philharmonic has been organising the Špilberk Festival at the end of August in the courtyard of the castle of the same name. Four open-air musical evenings offer the audience a selection of concerts featuring classical, film and computer music, as well as often jazz and other genres. This makes it a diverse mix of performers and repertoires with an often pleasant, summery, laid-back ambience. This year's big and rapdily sold-out attraction was the Wednesday evening of 21 August, full of melodies from the James Bond films, performed by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, headed by world-renowned conductor, composer and arranger Steven Mercurio. During the concert, the audience also got to enjoy singers Sara Milfajtová, Vendula Příhodová and David Kraus. more
As part of its European tour, the Taiwanese Taipei Philharmonic Chamber Choir (TPCC), under the direction of artistic director and choirmaster Dr. YuChung Johnny Ku, took the city up on its invitation and visited Brno. The concert was held on Monday, 13th August in the hall of the newly renovated Passage Hotel. more
The final concert of this year's season of the Brno Philharmonic was devoted to works by Antonín Dvořák and Jean Sibelius at the Janáček Theatre. On Thursday, 20 June, Danish conductor Michael Schønwandt, who had not appeared before a Brno audience since January last year, took the lead of the Philharmonic. In the first half of the programme, the orchestra was accompanied by violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky. more
In the spirit of the idea that Brno and folklore belong together, the Folklore Ensemble Happening of the Year took place on Thursday 6 June. The event was organised by the Brno UNESCO City of Music Office in cooperation with the Brno Dances and Sings association. The event thus became part of a long-term project that set out to map the amateur music scene in Brno, and not only folk music. Last year Brno City of Music reached out to choirs in a similar way, and in the future will host garage bands and more. This just goes to prove the diversity of Brno's music scene, not only as regards professional ensembles, but also enthusiastic amateurs for whom music is an inseparable part of their lives. more
The Brno Dances and Sings Association and TIC Brno organised the 49th annual Brno Dances and Sings show on 6 June. The programme, concentrated into a single day, was busier than in previous years. The subtitle Year of Folklore Ensembles was borrowed from the project of the same name organised by the Brno UNESCO City of Music Office. more
A year ago we would have found an Asian market in the New Synagogue in Velké Meziříčí. However, the town decided to buy the building and has started to make more fitting and dignified use of it. On Wednesday 5 June, during the ongoing Concentus Moraviae festival, audiences could visit this heritage site and enjoy a chamber concert by singer and violinist Iva Bittová and her women's choir Babačka, featuring musicians Jakub Jedlinský (accordion) and Pavel Fischer (violin). more
The evening concert by Ensemble Opera Diversa entitled The Face of Water, which took place on 4 June outdoors in the atrium of the Moravian Library in Brno, was preceded by a morning discussion between Professor Miloš Štědron and Associate Professor Vladimír Maňas from the Institute of Musicology at Masaryk University. They both enjoyed an engaging talk on the theme of water in art (from Gregorian chant to the early 20th century), concluding with a sample of the edition and the playing of a recording of Janáček's symphony The Danube. The concert, conducted by Gabriela Tardonová and inspired by the theme of water, featured one world and three Czech premières. Harpist Dominika Kvardová appeared as a soloist. more
Like other music festivals, the 29th annual Concentus Moraviae International Music Festival has not only had to reflect the fact that it is the Year of Czech Music, but also the unique 200th anniversary of the birth of Bedřich Smetana, the founder of modern Czech music. The dramaturgy of this year’s festival, which has just launched, is in the spirit of "Metamorphoses: Czech Smetana!". The first festival concert, which took place on 31 May at the Kyjov Municipal Cultural Centre, gave a hint of the direction the rest of the festival's dramaturgy will take. The organisers of the show decided to explore Smetana's work from a fresh angle and to work not only with the music, but also with the audience’s expectations. The opening evening saw a performance of Smetana's famous String Quartet No. 1 in E minor From My Life, but in an arrangement for a symphony orchestra penned by conductor and pianist George Szell. Smetana's work was complemented by the world première of the Concerto for Flute and Orchestra "Sadunkertoja" by Finnish composer, conductor and artist in residence at the 29th annual festival, Olli Mustonen, commissioned especially for the festival. Mustonen also conducted the Prague Philharmonia's performance of the two works. Danish flautist Janne Thomsen performed as soloist. more
Musical Inventory Ensemble Opera Diversa
As part of Ensemble Opera Diversa's Musical Inventory series of concerts, which began back in 2017, the ensemble aims to present (re)discovered works and composers that we rarely hear on stage. However, this dramaturgical line also offers the space and initiative to create some completely new works performed in world premières. This time, the chamber concert held on Wednesday, 29 May 2024 in the auditorium of the Rector's Office of the Brno University of Technology (BUT) was directed by the Diversa Quartet: Barbara Tolarová (1st violin), Jan Bělohlávek (2nd violin), David Křivský (viola), Iva Wiesnerová (cello), OK Percussion Duo (Martin Opršál, Martin Kneibl), soloists Aneta Podracká Bendová (soprano) and pianist Tereza Plešáková. The theme was a nod to the Prague composition school from a pedagogical and artistic perspective. more
The concert with the subtitle Haydn and Shostakovich in G Minor closed the Philharmonia at Home subscription series on Thursday 16 May at the Besední dům. It was also the last concert of the 2023/24 season (not counting Friday's reprise), with the Brno Philharmonic led by its chief conductor Dennis Russell Davies. In the second half of the evening the orchestra was accompanied by singers Jana Šrejma Kačírková (soprano) and Jiří Služenko (bass). As the title of the concert implies, the dramaturgy juxtaposed works by Joseph Haydn and Dimitri Shostakovich, which are almost exclusively linked only by the key in which they were written. more
Connection, unity, contemplation - these words can be used to describe the musical evening of Schola Gregoriana Pragensis under the direction of David Eben and organist Tomáš Thon, which took place yesterday as part of the Easter Festival of Sacred Music at the church of St. Thomas. Not only the singing of a Gregorian chant, but also the works of composer Petr Eben (1929-2007) enlivened the church space with sound and colour for an hour. more
With a concert called Ensemble Inégal: Yesterday at the church of St. John, Zelenka opened the 31st edition of the Easter Festival of Sacred Music, this time with the suffix Terroir. This slightly mysterious word, which is popularly used in connection with wine, comes from the Latin word for land or soil, and carries the sum of all the influences, especially the natural conditions of a particular location and on the plants grown there. This term is thus metonymically transferred to the programme of this year's VFDH, as it consists exclusively of works by Czech authors, thus complementing the ongoing Year of Czech Music. more
For the fourth subscription concert of the Philharmonic at Home series, which took place on 14 March at the Besední dům and was entitled Mozartiana, the Brno Philharmonic, this time under the direction of Czech-Japanese conductor Chuhei Iwasaki, chose four works from the 18th to 20th centuries. These works are dramaturgically linked either directly through their creation in the Classical period or by inspiration from musical practices typical of that period. The first half of the concert featured Martina Venc Matušínská with a solo flute. more
The second stop on the short Neues Klavier Trio Dresden's Czech-German tour was at the concert hall of the Janáček Academy of Music on 6 March at 16:00. A programme consisting of world premières by two Czech and two German composers was performed in four cities (Prague, Brno, Leipzig and Dresden). more
Editorial
Gloria Brunensis women's choir wins gold in the Praga Cantat competition
This year's 35th annual Prague Cantat international choir competition also featured the Brno choir Gloria Brunensis, which won first place in the Women's Choir category and a special prize for its performance of Der Wassermann. more
Zuzana Čtveráčková's translations were selected for the EU Songbook
Zuzana Čtveráčková, translator for the Brno City Theatre, has won the competition organised by the European Union Songbook Association, which in July 2020 invited translators to translate the lyrics of selected Czech songs into singable/melodic English. more
Singer-songwriter, composer and producer Katarzia is preparing two concerts with her band. They will be played in Brno and Prague. Both performances will feature a special line-up combining acoustic instruments and electronics. The music and lyrics will be enhanced by projected works of Czech-Icelandic artist DVDJ NNS. In addition, the Brno concert will be filmed by Czech Television under the direction of Tereza Reková. At the same time, Katarzia will be presenting some new work - her electronic album "Rest in Euphoria" with music composed for the eponymous performance of Prague's Cirk La Putyka will be released in early December. more
The Cotatcha Orchestra big band has been on the music scene for 10 years. They will be celebrating with a spectacular concert at the Goose on a String Theatre together with four guests - singers Lenka Dusilová and Géraldine Schnyder, double bass matador Vincenzo Kummer and trombonist and Latin Grammy winner Ilja Reijngoud. The sixteen-member ensemble nominated for the Anděl Award was founded by trumpeter Jiří Kotača to play original and original big band music. The anniversary concert will feature a selection of their best from past and present, including new works. All accompanied by animations by Magdalena Bláhová. more
Janáček Brno Festival: Change of programme - Staatskapelle Berlin will be led by Jakub Hrůša
Due to an injury, the Staatskapelle Berlin will not be led by its chief conductor Christian Thielemann at the festival concert. Standing in for him will be conductor Jakub Hrůša, who has already performed with his Bamberg Symphonies at the Janáček Brno Festival this year. more
The Brno Philharmonic announces a new date for Pavel Černoch’s concert
The Brno Philharmonic has announced a new date for Pavel Černoch's concert, as a substitute for his summer concert at Špilberk that was brought to an end by a storm. The concert is scheduled for May 2025. more
Culture Newsletter of the Culture Department of the Brno City Municipality, November 2024
The Brno Culture Newsletter presents an overview of upcoming events and opportunities concerning theatres, clubs and other cultural events in Brno. more
Although there are still two concerts left before the end of this year's JazzFestBrno festival, the organisers are already coming up with the line-up for next year. From the beginning of February to May, they’ll be offering a total of thirteen concerts featuring major world jazz stars and intimate performances from the Club Life series in the stylish Cabaret des Péchés. The winner of five Grammys, singer Dianne Reeves, one of the most respected figures in the world of orchestral jazz, nine-time Grammy winner Maria Schneider with the Oslo Jazz Ensemble, jazz piano stars and Grammy winners Kris Davis and Sullivan Fortner, the British trio Mammal Hands combining jazz and electronics, Italian virtuoso guitarist Matteo Mancuso - these and many others will all be coming to Brno. more
Brno Contemporary Orchestra: A breath in and a long breath out for forty drowned children on Mendlovo náměstí
The concert is dedicated to the memory of the forty children drowned during World War II on Mendlovo náměstí (20 November 1944). The concert will feature the world premières of two commissioned compositions, Adagio for Orchestra by Adrián Demoč and the meditative Exercise of Breath and Spirit by Pavel Zlámal. Clarinettist Marek Švejkar will perform the Czech première of Domaines by Pierre Boulez and the final performance will be the somewhat atypical Actions by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. more
Schnittke 90 & Bach: The Brno Philharmonic launches another subscription series
Johann Sebastian Bach as a ground-breaking composer and the composers who were inspired by his work are the subject of the concert Schnittke 90 & Bach, to be played by the Brno Philharmonic on Thursday and Friday, opening another subscription series. The concerts will be conducted by Robert Kružík at the Besední dům. more
