Reviews
The classical ballet Sleeping Beauty in four parts (prologue and three acts) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was performed by the National Theatre Brno on the stage of the Mahen Theatre. more
In the week before Easter JazzFest entered its second half. Another series of concerts linking various forms of jazz from traditional through jazz-rock to funk begun with an evening of Brno and Prague jazz legends in CED Husa na provázku and followed by a double concert of the Jiří Šimek guitar trio and the stellar Poogie Bell Band with their unmistakeable (and resounding) frontman on his drum kit. more
In including Patricia Barber in the concert series of the National Theatre Brno the director Filip Haberman has fulfilled not just his own dreams. The original jewel of the American jazz scene filled the Mahen Theatre with listeners and provided a spectacular musical experience. It was as if the space was predestined for the performance of this concert. The theatre auditorium underlined the singer’s grandeur, but at the same time created a chamber, almost club-like atmosphere. This time Patricia Barber travelled to the Czech Republic from her hometown of Chicago as a trio of young musicians – with the double bass player Patrick Mulcahy and the drummer Nat Friedman. more
In the intimate setting of the Theatre Husa na provázku the programme director of Brno’s JazzFest, Vilém Spilka decided to hold two smaller chamber concerts. It was a good decision since the audience had an opportunity from up close to see soloists swapping with musicians and so become part of an interesting event. more
In Brno’s Blahoslavův dům a concert took place drawing on the legacy of Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble. Rather than copying the project from the nineties the ensemble Cantar Lontano and Gavino Murgia provided an authentic interpretation and it was a great success. more
The sixteenth JazzFestBrno – along with other strong programming – offers a chance to compare the playing of several excellent saxophonists. Immediately on the opening night (23 March) the exquisite Joe Lovano will be playing in the Sono Centre, and on 19 April in the same place Chris Potter will have his chance to shine as several times winner of various journalists’ surveys of the best players in the world on the tenor saxophone. Listeners will have a chance to compare two European players on Wednesday 29 March, when on the stage of the Sono Centre the Czech saxophonist based in Denmark, Luboš Soukup, and his Norwegian contemporary Marius Neset, also living in Copenhagen, take turns on stage. And on 5 April a young Czech who is studying in Norway, Michal Wróblewski, will be performing with his international ensemble. more
Love at a Distance is a contemporary opera that is nonetheless a clear classic. The National Theatre Brno production is of this excellent work by Kaiji Saariaho that has become part of the world repertoire. The selection and realisation of this production has uniquely and significantly scored in a domestic context. more
The combination of modern jazz with tramp songs is insane at first glance or – as Vilém Spilka likes to say – a piece with a "Cimrman element". In reality, however, Spilka's new album Podvod (Deception) with adaptations of Honza Nedvěd's songs is a surprising but, in terms of musical tradition, a perfectly understandable project. more
Nearly sixty students of the Faculty of Music at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts joined forces to launch two operas in their home-based Orlí Street Theatre. The evening belonged to a pair of chamber operas. The first one was the premiere of the short opera Mistrová, aneb Když bolševici zrušili Vánoce (Forewomen aka When the Bolsheviks Cancelled Christmas) by Petr Hala. And the opera The Little Prince by Miroslav Hába was performed for the first time after nearly forty years. more
The music career of the violinist and singer Jitka Šuranská resembles a spiral motion. More than ten years ago, she chose cooperation in a duo with Jiří Plocek over dulcimer music, in which she was a regular member. After that, she played folk songs alone with a looper, and her first solo album Nězachoď slunečko was truly a solo album but with many guests. And now she is releasing another record. However, this time as a member of a new band, a very compact and bright sounding trio. By the way, the fact that the word TRIO is on the album cover – unlike the names of the band members – in capitals stresses that it is truly a band album and not a solo one. And in this lies both the greatest strength as well as some minor weaknesses of the recording. more
The new family comedy Jak jsem se ztratil aneb Malá vánoční povídka (How I Got Lost or a Little Christmas Story) bets on more than just a music flashback to the sweet early 1960s. The Brno National Theatre has been playing it since its weekend premiere. A seven-member band directly on stage forms the audio and narrative backdrop to the sentimental journey back in time. Older folks will emotionally reflect on the sweet "sixties", while those younger will discover this decade. And that is what the new production of director Martin Františák bets on. more
The prologue of the November echoes of the JazzFest in Brno was Wednesday's concert of a four-member star formation around guitarist John Scofield. Their five-week European tour promoting the new album Country For Old Men released in September of this year continued in the Sono Centrum. more
It is like the state budget: It can be considered the budget of any new government only two years after its election. This applies in all aspects, starting from the perspective of an idea and ending with the purely practical, i.e. technical, promotional and organisational perspective. Two years ago, the Janáček Brno Festival was the proverbial tipping point. The new director of the organiser Brno National Theatre had only been in office for a year and the opera director Jiří Heřman for six months. A lot of change was going on at Brno City Hall (which remains the only major benefactor of large music and theatre institutions; it seems like this does not concern the regions and the state) and the existing dramaturgical nature of the event was dismantled after the festival. After two years, the concert series can be seen as a series of alternating successes, however, with some worrying symptoms of amateurism. more
The musical scene of the Brno City Theatre stages the musical comedy Lemonade Joe. Therefore, one of the most popular post-war heroes, who has been criss-crossing the Czech stages since 1944, returned to the local main stage last weekend. He became immortal in 1964 thanks to a brilliant film, a replica of which cannot be expected this time though. First of all, the theatre version contains many more songs, but the screenplay is different from the extraordinary celluloid version in some moments and in the final result. The new production directed by Petr Gazdík turned the well-known title into a wild narrative musical show that does not claim to be related to the famous film. On the contrary, thanks to its original humour and the method of its use, the new production tries to break through all the widely popular quotes to its own and legitimate version. more
Luboš Javůrek's Bokorama has never belonged to the absolute best of our folk scene but it has long maintained a position of a solid band whose melodic songs have the potential to reach a wide audience. More than a band, Bokomara is a trademark that covers various Javůrek projects – ranging from the singer-songwriter duo with Petra Šanclová to – today already traditional – the joint concert programme with Naďa Urbánková. 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
The autumn part of the year-long JazzFestBrno festival will open next week at the Sono Centre by Al Di Meola, one of the greatest jazz guitarists of all time. At the end of September, American trumpeter Randy Brecker, winner of seven Grammy Awards and twenty nominations, together with the Gustav Brom Radio Big Band, will celebrate 100 years of Czech Radio's Brno studio in their first ever joint concert at the same venue. The festival will also feature multi-instrumentalist Jiří Slavík and his ten-member ensemble Polka-boys. At the Goose on a String Theatre, as part of the Polkatime project, he will present radical adaptations of the polka that bring back the boldness and humour of this Czech national dance. American vibraphonist Joel Ross will be at the Letovice Elementary Art School Concert Hall. The autumn will also see the continuation of the Club Life series at Cabaret des Péchés. This time with the singer and "jazz artist for the hip hop generation" José James and a double concert featuring two of the Czech Republic’s leading jazz line-ups - the Robert Balzar Trio and the Matej Benko Quintet. The end of the festival will not feature cult American saxophonist Kamasi Washington, who is postponing his entire tour, including the Brno concert, to 18 March 2025 for health reasons. more
Flute and clarinet players present their talents at the Leoš Janáček International Competition
The Faculty of Music of the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts (JAMU) organises the prestigious International Leoš Janáček Competition in Brno every year. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the flute and clarinet competition. The final rounds of the competition in both disciplines will take place at the Besední dům, where the competitors will be accompanied by the Czech Virtuosi orchestra conducted by Vít Spilka and the Ensemble Opera Diversa orchestra conducted by Gabriela Tardonová. more
July 2024 Cultural newsletter from the BCH Department of Culture
The Brno Culture Newsletter presents an overview of what is happening in the city’s theatres, clubs, summer festivals and other cultural events in Brno. more
The Brno Philharmonic will open its 69th season marking the anniversaries of two musical greats: Smetana and Bruckner
The Brno Philharmonic will embark on its 69th season this Sunday. With this concert, principal conductor Dennis Russell Davies will begin his seventh year at the helm of the orchestra. The programme commemorates the anniversaries of two giants of the Romantic era: the founder of Czech national music, Bedřich Smetana, and the prominent Austrian symphonist Anton Bruckner, born 200 years ago this year. more
Janáček's opera: Peter Berger nominated for Thalia Award for the role of Dalibor
Peter Berger has been nominated for a Thalia Award for performing the role of Dalibor in the production of Smetana's opera Dalibor, directed by David Pountney and scored by Tomáš Hanus. more
Czech Ensemble Baroque opens the 13th season of the Bacha na Mozarta! subscription series
Czech Ensemble Baroque opens the 13th season of its "Bacha na Mozarta!” subscription series in Brno. The dramatic highlight of the season will be the performance of Antonio Vivaldi's only surviving oratorio, Judith Triumphans, with mezzo-soprano Dagmar Šašková and Swedish singing star Malena Ernman in the lead roles. Eight more subscription concerts will follow. more
Diverse Autumn 2024: premières and the ongoing Year of Czech Music
Ensemble Opera Diversa is looking forward to a diverse autumn packed with premières and exceptional collaborations, greatly enriching the ongoing Year of Czech Music. more
Open-air concert: as always, the National Theatre Brno will open the new season on the piazzetta in front of the Janáček Theatre
The National Theatre Brno will open its 2024/2025 season this Thursday. The concert on the piazzetta in front of the Janáček Theatre will feature the NdB Janáček Opera’s soloists, choir and orchestra led by chief conductor Marko Ivanović. Actors from the NdB drama troupe will also be performing, singing songs from the productions. The evening will be hosted by Jana Štvrtecká and Petr Bláha from the NdB Drama Theatre. more
Twenty Years of the Brno Municipal Theatre’s Music Theatre
To mark this important anniversary, the Brno Municipal Theatre will be presenting a selection of music that has appeared in the Music Theatre's repertoire over the past twenty years. Several times in September, a gala concert will be held to celebrate Twenty Years of the Music Theatre. more
The Brno Culture Newsletter presents an overview of what is happening in the city’s theatres, clubs, summer festivals and other cultural events in Brno. more
