Section Archive Czech Music
No respect for borders from Quakvarteto.
Music experts who follow the endlessly surprising musical output of violin
improviser and innovator Iva Bittova would agree that one of her most
sophisticated recordings has been her treatment of Bela Bartok's 44 Duets
for two violins. Obviously, Bittova, who usually makes music on her own,
needed a partner for this album. Her choice was a former colleague
Dorothea Kellerova - they both studied violin with the same professor.
Only few people were aware that even back then Kellerova had her own band,
with the strange name "Quakvarteto", which over the years has
grown into 6-member setup. They love to move between musical styles with a
witty smile, mixing piano and violin with woodwind, tuba and vocals. They
recently released a new album - an adaptation of Children's Songs by Chick
Corea.
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Reinventing folk music with the Moberg Ensemble
...and I felt happy within these songs, in which sorrow is not
reckless, laughter is not crooked, love is not ridiculous and hate is not
apprehensive, where people love with their bodies and souls, where they
draw knives or sabres in hatred, dance in joy, throw themselves into the
Danube in despair, where, for that matter, love is still love and pain is
still pain, where the original emotion is not yet devoid of itself and
where values are still unravaged; and it seemed to me that within these
songs I was at home, that I had my roots in there. That their world was my
primal point of reference... Milan Kundera, The Joke
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Encore: Raduza - the emotional power of the accordion
When the "Year of Czech Music" was launched in January, the jazz
flute player, Jiri Stivin, complained that this year's celebrations were
focusing far too much on classical music. So I make no apology for
departing from our usual classical themes in this week's Encore to look at
a musician whose music comes closer to the beer hall than the concert
platform. The thirty-year-old singer Raduza shot to fame a decade ago,
when she shared a stage with Suzanne Vega here in Prague. She accompanies
her songs on the accordion, and despite a huge and still growing following
here in the Czech Republic, she prefers to play in the intimacy of pubs
and clubs. Raduza's songs are powerful, raw and emotional, and are firmly
rooted in the pub and folk tradition. My colleague Mark Fernandes caught
up with her at one of her regular concerts in the Balbinova Club just
round the corner from the radio here in the centre of Prague. He recorded
some of her songs and she talked about her music.
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Magic Carpet: Gypsy music - a rediscovered heritage?
Folk songs from Eastern Europe were a strong inspiration for the great composers Leos Janacek and Bela Bartok. Both of them travelled through the countryside - Janacek in the Slovak-Moravian borderland, Bartok in Transylvania - and recorded village singers using wax cylinders - the only equipment available at the time. The material they collected is still much sought after.
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Encore: Janacek's great opera "Jenufa" - still fresh a hundred years on
It's a hundred years since the premiere of one of the great Czech operas,
"Jenufa", by Leos Janacek. The centenary was marked in style
last month with an international Janacek Festival in Brno, the capital of
Moravia, the eastern part of the Czech Republic, where Janacek lived and
worked nearly all his life, and where the opera was first performed in
January 1904. "Jenufa" was the work that first drew serious
attention to Janacek as a composer.
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Encore: The Agon Orchestra: bringing experimental music to wider audiences
Welcome to Encore, our monthly look at the world of Czech classical music.
Today we're going to be departing from the security of Dvorak or Smetana,
and delving into the rich world of contemporary Czech experimental music.
We'll be looking at the work of the Czech Republic's foremost experimental
musical ensemble, the Agon Orchestra, which - aptly enough - is housed in
one of Europe's most modern theatres, Prague's Divadlo Archa. The Agon
Orchestra's director is Ivan Bierhanzl.
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Josephine Baker - one of the great performers of all time - a 1970 interview with Radio Prague's Olga Szantova
When Josephine Baker died in Paris in 1975, over twenty thousand people
lined the city streets to watch her funeral procession. She is remembered
as one of the great performers of all time, overcoming poverty and racial
discrimination in the American south to become a legend in her lifetime.
In the 1920s her shows in her adopted Paris combined song, dance and
humour and took the city by storm, with an overt sensuality that for the
time was almost revolutionary. During the Second World War she worked with
the French Resistance, proving that her driving principles of freedom and
tolerance were a great deal more than skin-deep.
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Katerina Englichova and the harp: not just the music of angels
After her 1998 solo concert in New York's Weill Recital Hall, the New York
Times' critic described the young Czech harpist Katerina Englichova's
playing as "feisty", with a "vigor and precision of
touch", adding that for someone so slender she made "a
surprisingly large sound on the harp." Indeed you shouldn't be
deceived by appearances. With her long blond hair and slight frame
Katerina may look the typical harpist, but, as we'll be hearing in this
programme, her playing proves that the harp is an instrument of many
different moods and not just the music of angels. A few days ago Katerina
Englichova joined me in the studio to talk about her music. I asked
whether she had always dreamed of becoming a harpist.
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Fritz Weiss and a series of miraculous wartime jazz recordings
Prague's Jewish Museum recently released a CD that is nothing short of
miraculous. At the height of the Nazi occupation of Prague during the
Second World War, the Czech Jewish jazz musician, Fritz Weiss, made nearly
thirty recordings with the Emil Ludvik Orchestra. Weiss was musical leader
of the band and also made all the arrangements. Amazingly, he continued to
work with the band even after he was sent to the Terezin ghetto. In Encore
today, we'll be telling the story of these extraordinary swing recordings,
made literally in the shadow of the swastika.
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