Significant participation of artists from the USA at the Forfest 2008

Composer USA 2008

In the historical town of Kromeriz, the already 19th year of the International Festival of Contemporary Arts with Spiritual Orientation Forfest was held from June 21 to 29. Today, it's a feast of contemporary music and more modestly of contemporary art, dramaturgically settled and stylishly pluralistic, full of events, personalities, live composing and performing art. Its focus on spiritual works makes it unique in a Europe and probably also a worldwide scale.

About 38 Author's concerts were on the programme, performances of several soloists and ensembles, lectures, fora with foreign composers and performers, one workshop and two visual art presentations (Romanian painter Iosif Haidu and young Swiss painter Flavia Devonas).

Composers from Romania, the USA and Greece were predominant this year. However, other nationalities met in the halls and churches of Kromeriz as well – Scots, French, Portuguese, Italians, Slovakians and Germans.

Romanian contemporary music is very diverse today. This diversity could be seen in the two performances of the six-man Ensemble Archaeus Bucharest, which presented its composers like Stefan Niculescu, who uses sound mass techniques, the strongly folkloristic (reaching even somewhere to gothic influences) Ioan Caianu, Dan Dediu („Gothic concerto“, rich in composition and bacchic in instrumentation), its art director and conductor Liviu Danceanu („Panta rei“ written masterly and with great inventiveness and “La Musique du Rire et de l'Oubli“, with its instrumentation nearly resembling an orchestral sound; whereas the cycle of not quite contrasting miniatures lasting more than an hour „Exercitions of Admiration“) left the audience rather perplexed, and finally the beautifully tender, even stupefying Liviu Marinescu, a Romanian composer living in the USA. He also held one of the most interesting night fora.

As one of the composers from the USA, the already nearly „naturalized“ composer and multi-flautist Daniel Kessner with his wife, pianist Dolly Kessner, performed. They presented i.a. Two pieces in a world premiere – the „Toccata for Piano“ (centrical atonal music, which nevertheless shows the neoimpressionistic base of Kessner's compositional thinking, yet grounded in style synthesis) and „Poeme Exotique“ for flute and piano (plastically shaped coloured areas with expressive curves with shawm-like, though urgent, yet nearly harmless sounding microtonal processes around base notes).

The great American trio Richard Kravchak (oboe, English horn), Julia Heinen (clarinet) and Shari Raynor (piano) performed a representative program of compositions by Frank Campo („In the Woods“ and „La Fontana di Franco“, an explosion of expression and drama, urgent colourful surges), the already mentioned Liviu Marinescu („Resonance“, the resonance of a constant flow of even and tremolo notes from one remarkably modelled cluster to another, the tone material seems to be taken from the aliquot dispositions of the instruments), William Toutant, well known to the audience of the Forfest („Three Peccadilloes“, a richly structurated, not showy, though virtuoso piece of extreme drama, distinctly contrasted thematic parts, immensely interesting harmonical relations, imaginatively soluted „connecting“ of the oboe and the English horn, tiny aleathorical parts and in the end a slow chordal syrrithmic), Daniel Kessner („Rhapsody“, game of timbres, surges of urgency and immediate falls into intimate lyrical parts, progressively growing energy), Daniel Hosken („Three Pieces“ of peculiar tenderness, but maybe even anxiety, nostalgia, voices well led in an acoustic and dynamic way and in the way it uses the instruments' stop), the young composer Martin Gendelman (the “Giocoso“, not very giocoso-like, but certainly not uninteresting). The performances of the other three foreign ensembles were also a big delight for the audience: the Scottish Inchcolm New Music Ensemble, the musical part of the performance of the Italian Duo Messieri – Selva and the Portuguese Trio Persona.

The vocally instrumental Inchcolm New Music Ensemble with conductor Steve King brought dramaturgically a novelly conceived programme consisting of original plainchants (beautiful quadraphonic chants a capella composed one thousand years ago by monks in the county of Inchcolm) and of contemporary compositions inspired by these plainchants, e.g. a composition by John Hearne („Echoes of Inchcolm“, modal, rich in composition, powerful in sound), Paul Burnell (in one part of „A Sense of a Place Will Remain“ sometimes neo-renaissance-like, in another one with timbre particularities as though with a gentle hiss, clinking, whispering) and Hazel Macleod („Diluculo in Inchcolm“, a gentle, trembling introduction inspired by a nature scenery at dawn, after which everything start resounding with music into well composed garlands of colours, notes and rythms). Conductor Steve King's „Illuminating St. Columba“ enchanted in its first part with expressivity, ravishing rhythmic, in its second part it's the cantability that mesmerizes the audience, later it gradually panders by more and more shallow, cheap and kitschy means. Only in the final part interesting imitational and antiphonal procedures could be heard.

The unusual set-up of the Duo Messieri – Selva (compositions/electronic instruments - saxophones) from Italy gave space for the performance of unusual compositions. I can't help admitting that I was disappointed with Messieri’s work with electronic instruments. Without inventiveness, just long echoes or catching the last sound and its infiltrating into the next one. On the contrary, Michelle Selva's saxophone orgies in excellent Massimiliano Messieri’s compositions or in those made by Giacinto Scelsi or Sylvano Bussotti were a demonstration of performing master hood, the art of composing and showmanship in the best sense.

The organizers invited the young Portuguese ensemble Trio Persona (Natalie Grossmannova, a Czech living in Portugal – flute, Filipe Freitas – oboe, English horn, Joana Vieira – piano, hanging chimes) i.a. to perform two world premieres of contemporary composers – „Tres Visoes“ of the Portuguese composer Sergio Azevedo for flute, oboe and piano (a one movement but dually sounding architecture, an extensive, mystically sounding introduction, gibbous, stoutly dramatical second part with a repetitive kind of work) and „Commentaire sur Le Christ ressuscit“ for solo oboe by the English composer living in Lisbon Christopher Bochmann (a piece with very demanding substance, form and various instrumental finesses, there is a contrast between cantabile entries with almost romantic melodic and a following fragmentary work with small units in the way they are used in Berio's Sequences). The compositions were presented very convincibly, with brilliant technique and understanding, as well as two parts of Messiaen's „Vingt Regards sur l´Enfant Jésus“ and for pieces by the Author of this article. In the second one, an appellative, humanistic urgent melodrama „Pošli to dál“ (Send it on) on the lyrics of Vera Ludikova (there is also in an English version), Trio Persona was joined by the Czech actress and specialist on performance of melodramas Marie Vikova.

I couldn't omit mentioning another foreign artist's contribution to the treasure of the Forfest – the performance of „Messe de Saint-Georges“ for soprano, baritone and chamber orchestra by the charismatic Georgian composer living in France Nicolas Zourabichvili de Pelken. A vastly, powerfully arched mass work brilliantly performed on one hand almost epic in its sense, on the other hand with painful fragmentariness, cries and sorrow. It's a masterpiece, modern in sound and with respiring phrases, comparable with 20th great classic's forms (Q Vox vocal and soloists of Brno, Stella Maris - soprano, Tomas Krejci – baritone, Gabriela Tardonova – conductor).

Who, out of the artists of former Czechoslovakia, took my interest the most?

Right at the opening of the festival, it was the great Slovakian pianist Elena Letnanova – above all with the „Bacchanalias“ for prepared piano by John Cage full of wonderful non-cagean poetics and silent harmonies, or with her peculiar performance of „Čtyři skladby k obrazům Pieta Mondriana“ (Four Pieces by Piet Mondrian’s Paintings) by the Czech author Peter Graham using i.a. the style of graphic music and aleatory.

On the contrary, the dramaturgy of Katerina Chrobokova's organ recital was based on Peter Graham's neominimalistic compositions and the stylish antipode of Olivier Messiaen's compositions. Her Messiaen mesmerized on one hand with its playfulness, effulgence, colourful pianissimo, I also noticed the famous „woodnote“, on the other hand with her excellent work with the pedal and the simplicity of the pedalled choral as the opposite of multi-voice parts in the upper manuals.

Duo Eco (Eva and Pavla Francu) from Prague showed themselves perfectly prepared. Their performance of contemporary Czech composers Jan Slimacek, Jiri Matys, Leon Jurica, Jan Grossmann and Jiri Teml were an example of good coordination and chamber music intimity.

In the performance of the Slovakian violinist Milan Pala it was a musical and spiritual feast to hear the unique, interpretatatively brilliantly built-up symphony for solo violin „Ecce homo“ by Frantisek Emmert. I think, this great and incredibly modest Czech composer is still waiting to be discovered by music history.

Neither the Czech composer Miloslav Istvan, who died suddenly two moths after the Velvet Revolution and who left us a number of extraordinary pieces, the poetics of isolated musical elements and a gnarly view on Janacek's and Webern's heritage, belongs to authors treated justly by the musical present. Nevertheless, each piece from a different period of his work could be a part of the essential repertoire of performers. I actually didn't discover the „real Istvan“ , the one from the final period, until I heard his cello sonata: his work with rhythmical chains, colour, timbre, with phrases and the silence between them (the great performers Pavel Burdych -violin, Julian Veverica - viola, Stepan Filipek – cello, Zuzana Beresová – piano).

The dramaturgy of the final concert was, with its connection to medieval melodies, similar to the performance of the Inchcolm Ensemble. Well-known chants were heard in the performance of the vocal ensemble Schola Benedicta and were alternated by improvisations of the French organist Vincent Rigot and by the electro-acoustic or computer generated works by the young Czech composer Michal Rataj, which reflected the chants. I have always had an affinity for Rataj's ways of expression and his musical apprehension of Christian and general spiritual topics, the compositions „Oratorium electronicum“ and „Mluvici ticho“ (A Talking Silence), which could be heard in a world premiere in a version for flute and live electronics and „Invito“ for choir which were as though they were electrified by the spiritual message (Lenka Kozderkova - flute, Stepan Skoch – saxophone, Vincent Rigot – organ, conductor and founder of the Schola Jiri Hodina, live electronics were operated by the author).

Talking about other events my interest was held by the author colloquy of Rudolf Ruzicka – today's Czech Republic's most notable electro acoustic and computer music composer, musicologist Wanda Dobrovska's lectures on last year's International Rostrum of Electro acoustic Music in Lisbon and her night chatting in the Alma Club with foreign guests and composer Michal Rataj's lecture on electro acoustic compositions in the USA.

Jan Grossmann

The author is a Czech composer and a senior lecturer of music theory at the University of Zilina (Slovak Republic) and at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ostrava (Czech Republic).