Klangspuren 2006.

It is still fairly rare to find contemporary Czech music at major festivals abroad, and so it is quite an important event when such a festival decides to present an extensive range of contemporary Czech music. The most recent festival abroad to do so was the Klangspuren Festival in Austria, this year in September.

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The Klangspuren Festival specialising in contemporary music has been held since 1994 in the Tyrol, at several venues in the vicinity of Innsbruck. It is quite a big festival--this year it was almost three weeks long, and presented around seventy pieces, 11 of them commissioned by the festival itself. Klangspuren attracts stars of the calibre of Pierre Boulez or the Ensemble Modern, and all in all it is a very important festival. Each year it focuses on the music of one selected country and one of its composers. This year it was the turn of the Czech Republic, represented primarily by the composer Martin Smolka.

We offered a detailed account of Martin Smolka in Czech Music 3/2005, but let us still summarise the most significant facts about a man who is currently evidently the most visible Czech composer internationally. Martin Smolka (*1959) studied at the Prague Academy, but more important were his private studies with Marek Kopelent, at that time essentially banished from Czech musical life by the communist regime. Smolka says of himself that his main influences were post-Webernism and American minimal music, to which we should add that the so called Polish School has also played a major role in forming Smolka's composing style. At the start of the 1980s Smolka founded the Agon Ensemble, which gradually emerged as the most important Czech ensemble for contemporary music. Smolka wrote many pieces for Agon, and for him working with Agon Ensemble meant a chance to experiment with the unconventional techniques of play and bizarre sound elements typical of his music. When Smolka parted company with Agon Ensemble about ten years ago he was already a composer with a very distinctive and original style. It is one of the paradoxes of the situation of contemporary music in the Czech Republic that especially in German-speaking countries he has been played abroad much more than at home (and his works are published by the German Breitkopf & Hartel House). One significant exception to this rule has been the highly successful production of his "hockey opera" Nagano, which was commissioned by the National Theatre in Prague and won an Alfred Radok Prize (see Helena Havlikova's article in this number). Smolka is a genuinely internationally established composer, who is regularly commissioned to write pieces for prestigious festivals (of the most recent let us mention the premiere of an orchestral composition commissioned by the Donaueschinger Musiktage) and top concert performers. While to be represented at Klangspuren by a whole four pieces is important, in the context of Smolka's career it is by no means an isolated occurrence.

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From practically the start of this career Smolka has been repeating similar structural and emotional schemata, which work very well: various shades of melancholy and nostalgia alternating in very striking contrast with thunderous, cracked and husky grotesquery (often as a kind of echo of the first), everything many times repeated and many times returning in reprise. The structure of Smolka's music often resembles a collage of longer or shorter contrasting sections, with abrupt cuts. In terms of sound his music is highly individual and immediately identifiable, comprehensible on a first listen because of its iterative quality, rich in bizarre sounds with great evocative power, and characterised by microtonal deformations of the conventionalised elements of tonal music (it is old, so let it scrape away nostalgically).

All this applies to the compositions presented at Klangspuren. The orchestral Remix, Redream, Reflight, performed at the opening concert by the Tiroler Symphonieorchester Innsbruck conducted by Beat Furrer (for interest we should add that the Czech music presented at the concert also included Leos Janacek's orchestral rhapsody Taras Bulba), was written in 2000 and is one of the most frequently played Smolka works for a large ensemble. It was followed by choral pieces: Walden, the Distiller of Celestial Dews (2000) on texts by H.D. Thoreau and the premiered piece Slone i smutne [Salty and sad] on a text by Tadeusz Rozewicz. Both compositions were performed by the Latvian Radio Choir.

The quartet of Smolka pieces performed at Klangspuren was rounded off by the percussionist Tomas Odrusek (see CM 1/05, www.czech-music.net/cm1-05.php) playing Ringing for solo percussion of 1989 at a solo concert preceded by a reading given by the middle-generation Czech writer Jachym Topol. Ondrusek combined world repertoire (David Lang, Iannis Xenakis) with music by Czech composers. Apart from the Smolka composition he performed Ormai by Milos Haase (1948) and the small, seemingly very simple Secreta by Peter Graham (see CM 2/05, www.czech-music.net/cm2-05.php). There is no doubt at all that as far as contemporary music is concerned (and in practice it is the only repertoire for multipercussion), Tomas Ondrusek is one of the best Czech performers and is naturally a part of the international scene. At present he is head of the percussion department at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and as well as teaching he actually organises the summer courses "Trstenice Percussion Workshops" for percussionists and composers.

Also representing Czech contemporary music at the festivals was the Mondschein Ensemble, which in recent years has shortened its name to MoEns. The ensemble was founded in 1995 by a group of Prague musicians and composers around the composer and conductor Miroslav Pudlak--incidentally also a co-founder of the Agon Ensemble mentioned above--, and the clarinettist Kamil Dolezal. Their aim was to provide Czech musical life with a platform for the professional performance of contemporary music in the form of a stable musical ensemble. The basis of the MoEns repertoire is the music of the younger generation of Czech composers complemented by selected contemporary works from abroad and the music of the classics of the later 20th century. The ensemble also commissions new works for its repertoire. The ensemble's concert programmes have often focused on individual composers or movements (Kagel, Reich, Kurtag, Andriessen, New Complexity) or the contemporary output of other countries (Lithuania, Finland, Hungary, Japan, Germany and so on). Each year MoEns commissions work from young composers and in the ten years of its existence has given concert premieres of at least 50 new pieces. It regularly records contemporary Czech music for Czech Radio and CD recordings, and has appeared at many international festivals.

At Klangspuren MoEns appeared reinforced by the Saxophone Quartet Bohemia with a programme of music by Miroslav Pudlak (1961), Marek Kopelent (1932), Hanus Barton (1960; Barton also plays in MoEns as a pianist) and Martin Hybler (1977). In all cases the compositions were premieres and the programme was created specially for Klangspuren.

Finally Klangspuren presented the composer Michal Nejtek (1977; see CM 4/05) with a premiere of his piece for percussion Frame Dreams, commissioned by the festival (performed by Windkraft) and Miroslav Srnka (1975; see CM 2/06, www.czech-music.net/cm2-06.php), whose choral cycle Podvrhy--Forgeries was performed at the festival for the first time in complete form. The work was sung by the Latvian Radio Choir.