Today Iva Bittová is an internationally recognized phenomenon on the boundary between performance and composition, with an almost equal involvement in the fields of classical, popular and folk music.

This festival is not the first time she has offered her own view of Janáček through the prism of jazz, folk or art rock. She has regularly interpreted Janáček’s individual compositions in her own unforgettable style, and her 2004 realization of the cycle of Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs together with the Škampa Quartet, with arrangements by Vladimír Godár, represented a break with the previously conventional interpretations of this vocal cycle by Janáček.

So it is appropriate that she will be performing her recital in conjunction with two excellent Brno drummers, the OK Percussion Duo of Martin Opršál and Martin Kleibl, and combining voice, violin and phonic elements with melodic and other percussion instruments in arrangements of Janáček miniatures by Miloš Štědroň.

Janáček probably wrote the piece I Am Waiting for You for the harmonium which he had in Hukvaldy some time after 5 August 1928 – one week before his death – dedicating it to Kamila Stoesslova. Iva will be returning to this ten-bar miniature for the second time. Two blocks of contrasting speech melodies will be linked by breaks on the percussion instruments, creating a kind of dramatic scene. This is evidence of how, even though Janáček maintained a strict separation between the speech melodies, mostly written down outdoors, and his compositional activities, the artistic factor clearly predominates in these “scientific” studies of the melody of human speech and points to the poetics of Janáček’s operas.

Janáček had a piano arrangement of the Lachian dance “Pilky” published by A. Píša in Brno together with another of the dances, “Čeladenský, in the spring of 1905. In this case an arrangement for melodic percussion instruments directly suggested itself. A similar role is played in the recital by the arrangement of the organ solo from the Glagolitic Mass and part III of the Danube symphony, where the vocal part was directly chosen by Janáček.

The piano miniature In Memoriam evidently dates back to 1887 and is one of the most striking examples of Janáček’s emerging original style: here we find two typical traits – a very fast and short ostinato figure and the sustained nature of the whole miniature due to the chord progressions which are practically without harmony. Part XIII – a piano sonata miniature from the vocal cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared, with its ostinato character and clipped diction, also lends itself to being connected with percussion instruments. The recital will also include some bonus items, which will be added during preparations for the concert in the spring and summer of 2016.

The composer, pianist and jazzman Emil Viklický made an impressive debut in 1977 with his album V Holomóci. His synthesis of the modal approaches of jazz from the 1970s was soon augmented by his study of Moravian folklore and, of course, the music of Leoš Janáček. His interest in this area culminated with his studies in Boston, and Viklický continued to inventively combine jazz influences with compositional techniques from the second half of the 20th century and gradually moved towards opera and other areas of classical music, becoming a symbol of the ideal conjunction of the two worlds of popular and classical music.

From the outset, the influence of Janáček encouraged him to make full use of the approaches of folk music – not only its melodies, modes and rhythms, but also its tonal qualities. He avoided the path taken by other composers, who since the time of Vítězslav Novák had wanted to improve folk music and enrich it harmonically by introducing the complex chords of post-Tristan harmony into a world where they didn’t belong. Even though this kind of fusion might result in interesting artistic syntheses, Janáček’s course proved to be a much more productive one. It fully respected the music’s simplicity, rawness and often seeming “primitivism”, and found in it a source for its own “verism, impressionism and expressionism”… Of course, the temptation for harmonic enrichment also existed in jazz and since the mid-20th century has had very notable representatives whom it would be difficult to overlook, and we will also hear it at some points of today’s recital – however, here it operates only as an additional source of inspiration. Janáček has been an inspirational figure for a long time now, and Emil Viklický arranges and, more importantly, creatively builds upon selected segments or units of his work. At the same time, his is not a superficial search for rhythmic ostinato and “snappy” structures which lead directly to jazz stylization. On the contrary, he searches for cantilenas and harmonically, melodically and tectonically interesting areas. He produced a masterful response to Janáček’s Sinfonietta, focusing on a point which few people would have expected, and he did the same with passages from the second act of Jenůfa.

Folklore connections are organically linked to the whole attempt at a synthesis of folklore, jazz and Janáček’s ideas which Emil Viklický has been developing since the late 1970s. Over the past decade, however, the indisputable contribution of this contemporary composer and performer has also been enriched by his international career and the frequent presentation of these aspects among jazzmen and concert audiences in the West and collaboration with outstanding jazz musicians on concert stages and in studios on work of this kind ignited by Janáček’s legacy.

Miloš Štědroň