News
Starting today, the St. James' Ossuary is also open to visitors at night. Throughout August, Friday nights will be dedicated to tours accompanied by the music of Miloš Štědroň that he composed specifically for these spaces. more
Cultural subsidy programmes for the following year have been approved and the deadline for submitting applications is approaching.
This year, the 17th annual festival brings five concerts and two cinema concerts showings in the large Šilberk Castle courtyard. Orff's cantata Carmina Burana, Antonín Dvořák's Te Deum and Händel's Messiah will be played. The event will feature performances by Dagmar Pecková, Ondřej Havelka and his Melody Makers, Dan Bárta, the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra and the Czech Philharmonic Choir. more
The Brno Philharmonic Orchestra announces that it is currently hiring for the position of the Manager and Head of Marketing. Start date available from September 2016. more
A discussion with the Czech composer, conductor and flautist Petr Kotik will take place at the premises of the Institute of Musicology in Brno today. He is the founder of the S.E.M Ensemble and the Ostravská Banda ensemble and artistic director of the Ostrava Festival of New Music - Ostrava Days. more
The album Jako živý was released by the band Folk Team on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. Along with them, a new CD called Koncert will be launched by AG Flek.
Tribute will be paid to Zuzana Navarová by her longtime colleague and friend –the Colombian guitarist and songwriter Iván Gutiérrez, along with the singer Kateřina Reichová and her band. more
Shakespeare, Beethoven and the tradition of Czech quartets: These are the main topics of already the 21st year of the festival that has just revealed its residing ensemble, which is the world-known Pavel Haas Quartet. more
The Brno City Theatre (MdB) is advertising for the posts of the main and minor characters in the rock opera the Gospel for Mary staging. more
Andrea Konstankiewicz and Dorota Barová have played in the duo for fifteen years. Now they are releasing the selection of their best compositions so far. more
The now world-famous Swedish band Dirty Loops finished their autumn European tour on Saturday, 30 November at Brno's Metro Music Bar. The band featured on the programme of the seventeenth annual Groove Brno funk, soul and jazz festival. The virtuoso trio, consisting of Jonah Nilsson - vocals and keyboards, Henrik Linder - bass guitar and Aron Mellergård - drums, are famous for their flawless technical proficiency, sophisticated original compositions and cover versions of well-known numbers, especially pop songs. However, these songs are often reharmonised in their arrangements and the style is more a combination of disco, pop and jazz fusion. To avoid having to resort to using pre-recorded backing tracks, the trio was joined on tour by keyboardist and vocalist Kristian Kraftling. more
Ensemble Opera Diversa put a distinctive "spin" on its last orchestral concert of the year. It took place on 26 November at the Alterna music club, which is more a rock, electronica and indie pop hangout than an artistic music venue. The pair of selected pieces consisting of Vojtěch Dlask's premièred work Querell Songs for soprano saxophone and strings and Miloslav Ištvan's Hard Blues for pop-baritone, soprano, reciter and chamber ensemble also reflected this. Naturally, it was Ištvan's Hard Blues that gave the evening its name - the clash of the artistic, composed and purposefully "artistic" world (not meant pejoratively) with authentic African-American musical expressions springing from the depths of the soul of a man tested by life formed as the centre of the evening. This was not merely a stylistic inspiration, but more thematic, which was also evident in the opening piece of the evening. This was the composition Querelle Songs, inspired by Jean Genet's novel, previously dedicated to Ensemble Opera Diversa, but this time in a new instrumentation. more
Leoš Janáček's (1854-1928) Moravian national opera Jenůfa was brought to Brno for the Janáček Brno 2024 festival by the Moravian Theatre Olomouc in a co-production with the Janáček Opera NdB. Rather than using the Czech title Její pastorkyňa, the production team, headed by director Veronika Kos Loulová, decided to stage the work as Jenůfa, the name under which it is performed abroad. On Wednesday, 20 November, five days after its première in Olomouc, the audience at the Mahen Theatre could also see the latest domestic take on Janáček's most widely performed opera. The musical staging of the significantly modified original version from 1904 was the work of conductor Anna Novotná Pešková, and the main roles were played by Barbora Perná (Jenůfa), Eliška Gattringerová (Kostelnička), Josef Moravec (Laca Klemeň) and Roman Hasymau (Števa Buryja). more
The office of Brno - UNESCO City of Music, with the financial support of the South Moravian Region, presents a line-up of active folklore groups (ensembles, chasers, musics) in the Brno region as part of the Year of Folklore Ensembles. more
Trumpeter Jiří Kotača founded the big band Cotatcha Orchestra ten years ago. Nowadays, he performs a variety of programmes ranging from the most traditional jazz to a visionary fusion of jazz and electronica. We chatted with Jiří Kotača about how the orchestra has gradually developed, how the original repertoire is blurring the boundaries between jazz and electronica, and also about what fans can expect from the November concert to celebrate the orchestra's 10th anniversary. We also talk about Kotača's International Quartet, as well as how the trumpet and flugelhorn can be enriched with effects. more
