SMUTEK UTEK?! / MORAVIAN AUTUMN

OLIVIER MESSIAEN
Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus for cello and piano

MAREK KOPELENT
Karrak for cello and piano

LEOŠ JANÁČEK
Pohádka (Fairy Tale) for cello and piano

LEOŠ JANÁČEK / arr. Jiří Bárta (for cello and piano)
Sonata for violin and piano

MARTIN SMOLKA
Smutek utek (Sadness fled) for cello and piano

OLIVIER MESSIAEN / arr. Jiří Bárta (for cello and piano)
Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus for violin and piano

Jiří Bárta cello

Terezie Fialová piano

Download concert programme (in Czech) here.

Place of the concert: Kostel sv. Augustina

Before the concert, a presentation of a book about Leoš Janáček will take place at 6:00pm in Klafé (Klácelova 1a).

The piece by Martin Smolka, Smutek utek, which could be rendered as Sadness Fled Away, gives this programme its title. It was commissioned by the Kutná Hora International Music Festival for Jiří Bárta and first played by tonight’s performers there in 2018. In line with his compositional language, Smolka achieved in this work – that lasts for nearly 20 minutes – an inner reductionism.

The 1991 piece, Karrak by Marek Kopelent adds something of a mirrored element to the programme, with its palindromic title and structure. Although it does not deny its origins in Kopelent’s avant-garde harmonic thinking, musical reductionism also prevails in this work, imbuing it with an ambient, quiet, calm atmosphere.
Two works by Leoš Janáček sit at the notional centre of the programme. Pohádka, or Fairy-Tale, his only work for cello and piano, was written during a difficult period following the death of his daughter Olga, when Janáček was still looking for broader recognition of his music. Most of the work, loosely based on scenes from The Tale of Tsar Berendey, is written in keys with six flats, giving the music a hazy character akin to the cycle V mlhách (In the Mists). Parts were used in two filmed novels: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera) and The Discovery of Heaven (Harry Mulisch).
Janáček also left us only one major work for violin and piano – a Sonata written in 1914. A fairly compact work, it is punctuated by rhapsodic melodic motifs and abrupt changes in rhythm and tempo, and will be heard tonight in Jiří Bárta’s version for cello and piano. It ends mysteriously, suspended in quiet contemplation.
The programme is bookended by two movements from Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps. This was devised as a musical conception of time as the end of the past and of the future and the beginning of eternity. That is perhaps why the slow yet urgent rise of the solo part celebrating the immortality of Jesus, arranged by Bárta for cello and piano, depicts “the ascent of man to his god, the child of God to his Father, the being made divine towards Paradise”, while the celebration of the eternity of Jesus is likened by Messiaen to the biblical verse, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Jiří Bárta also understands the two ecstatic movements metaphysically: as the beginning and the end, cosmic eternity and infinite beauty embracing life in its joys and sorrows.

Jiří Čevela