Brno Contemporary Orchestra

Josef Berg: Breakfast at the Schlankenwald Castle
Alois Piňos / Dalibor Chatrný: Genesis
Miloslav Ištvan – Love, Defiance and Death for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble on the theme of the play Maryša by the Mrštík brothers.
Petr Kofroň – Ghetto Brünn

 

Around 1960, a kind of “study community” of composers who had undergone tumultuous changes of opinion was formed in Brno, focused on the discovery of the so-called New Music. The unofficial members were Alois Piňos, Josef Berg and Miloslav Ištvan. Thanks to the concentration of similarly oriented, though personally different individualities, the period 1960–1970 is often referred to as the “golden age of the Brno avant-garde”. The first fruit of this atmosphere was the Brno Creative Group A (the name was determined by alphabetical order, it was expected that other groups B, C… will form), whose members were the composers Jan Novák, Alois Piňos, Josef Berg, Miloslav Ištvan, Zdeněk Pololáník, the artist Dalibor Chatrný, the musicologists František Hrabal and Milena Černohorská, and then Miloš Štědroň. A new tendency emerged, accepting the development of Western European music, searching, experimenting, and connecting visual, theatrical and musical art. Josef Berg (1927–1971), who died prematurely, was a very distinctive artistic personality on the border between music, theatre and literature, who played an irreplaceable role in Brno’s musical scene. Of his extensive oeuvre, his music-dramatic work is still inspiring today. The puppet-acting performance Breakfast at the Schlankenwald Castle was created in 1966 and uses dialogue in archaic late 19th century Czech puppet-acting, with only the singing of the Czech miner in German.

Composer Alois Piňos (1925–2008) and artist Dalibor Chatrný (1925–2012) created three unique audiovisual compositions between 1969 and 1970. The first was Static Composition for slides and electronics, the second was Lattice for filmstrip and piano, and the third was Genesis for filmstrip and chamber orchestra. The artistic basis of Genesis is the confrontation of contrasting elements of wavy lines and chopped broken lines, while Piňos entrusted the orchestra to soprano saxophone, trombone, jonica124, harp, harpsichord, violins, cello and percussion.

Love, Defiance and Death by Miloslav Ištvan was written in 1984. A year earlier, the composer created the incidental music for Alois and Vilém Mrštík’s drama Maryša, which appealed to him because of its dramatic story, social subtext and the folkloric setting of Slovácko. In addition to the mezzo-soprano, Ištvan used an unconventional ensemble: polyphonic and monophonic synthesizers, two cymbals and percussion instruments.

The composition Ghetto Brünn by Petr Kofron (born 1955) was commissioned by the Brno Contemporary Orchestra in 2022. The composition by the leading Czech composer is intended for a chamber orchestra.

Jiří Zahrádka