Magdalena Kožená, patroness of the Concentus Moraviae festival, today will take the stage of Brno’s Boby Centre with Ondřej Havelka and his Melody Makers. This benefit concert for the festival will jointly promote the songs of Cole Porter and at the same time invite us to the next year. The event will also include the christening of the Cole Porter CD with songs which will be performed by Kožená and Havelka’s Melody Makers in a premiere as part of this year’s Concentus Moraviae festival.
“We borrowed the subtitle of this gala concert, Let’s Misbehave, from one of Porter’s hits. That is because it is a perfect prelude to the theme of the twenty-third Concentus Moraviae festival, which will be dedicated to humour in music, in a programme from the Belgian musicologist Jelle Dierickx. On the occasion of the gala evening in the Boby Centre we will be revealing five selected exclusive concert programmes for June 2018!” promises festival director David Dittrich.
During the Concentus Moraviae festival, which will be taking place between 1 and 27 June 2018, listeners will be exposed to an abundance of all kinds of musical nonsenses, jokes and baroque pranks, from the Musical Joke by W. A. Mozart through to works “in the shape of a pear”. Music with a smile will be performed on the festival’s stages by Iva Bittová and Ensemble Opera Diversa, the duo of phenomenal musical clowns Igudesman and Joo, as well as the Collegium Marianum and Cracovia Danza with the ‘Bach-ish’ Ballet about Coffee, Soňa Červená with the pianist Karel Košárek and the Orchestr Berg and others. The composer in residence for the twenty-third year of the festival Concentus Moraviae is characteristically Miloš Štědroň, a composer and musicologist of broad tastes, for whom the theme of the festival is crucial to his life and works.
The creator of the programme for the twenty-third year of Concentus Moraviae, Jelle Dierickx, was inspired by the comment from the one of the greatest musical entertainers, pianists and conductors, Victor Borge, who said that “a smile if the shortest distance between two people”. With the popular seventh Humoresque by Antonín Dvořák as its central melody the festival will examine the fascinating connection between music and humour. Many music festivals focus on the “sublime”, but only a few on the “ridiculous”. “Linking music and humour has often been the work of musical clowns, but a lot more can be done than just replacing noes with red noses,” explains Jelle Dierickx and adds: “Famous comedians such as Charlie Chaplin or Louis de Funès knew this. Philosophers and writers such as Socrates, Diogenes, Cervantes, Montaigne, Nietzsche or Kundera all had their humour and in this helped to define Europe. According to Milan Kundera laughter is even a metaphor for Europa, containing the ability to doubt, to be critical. Music is able to supplement this in a gentle and refined way.” And Concentus Moraviae 2018 will seek out and show all of that.
Today, 7 December 2017 tickets will go on sale for the five selected concerts. All the information on the Gala Concert, the Concentus Moraviae 2018 festival and the sale of tickets for the first five published concerts, beginning 7 December, can be found here.
