PKF will celebrate this year’s jubilant Kopelent and Kotík with a concert on Friday
The concert on the occasion of the round birthdays of two personalities of Czech modern music will take place on Friday, December 16, in the hall of the NoD Theatre.
PKF — Prague Philharmonic organized by Friday, December 16 this year already the third concert as part of its subscription cycle of contemporary music (S). In the hall NoD Theaters in Dlouhá Street in Prague, this time the dramaturgy of the cycle Hana Dohnálková will welcome two guests who are currently among the best-known and most recognized living Czech composers abroad.
It is Marek Kopelentwho celebrated his 90th birthday this year, and also Petr Kotík, this year’s octogenarian. Although both composers lived, grew up, studied and began their artistic careers in Prague, they eventually went in different directions. While Marek Kopelent composed and realized his projects on the basis of domestic and international opportunities all his life, mainly in his hometown, where he is also associated with the compositions of the department HAM, Petr Kotík already moved to the USA in 1969. There he organized his own concerts where his music was played and where he also performed as a conductor and flutist, which he still does today. His post-revolutionary activities here in the Czech Republic are connected to Ostrava, where he organizes an international festival of contemporary music, rather than to Prague Ostrava days.
“The concert program was created gradually from my first drafts, through mutual fine-tuning and debates with both composers to the final form that the listeners will hear on Friday,” points out Hana Dohnálková about the evening’s program, which presents the work of both authors practically from the beginning of their compositional work to almost the present day. That’s how it sounds from Marko Kopelent String Quartet No. 3 (1963), Music for 5 (1964), Black and white tears (1972) and the latest Music from silence (2018), by Petr Kotík then Etude 4 (1961), Congo (1962) a String Quartet No. 2 “Torso” (2012). As is customary in the Contemporary Music Cycle, the concert will end with a debate.
Photo (from left): Petr Kotík, Marek Kopelent (©Ondřej Melecký)