Stories and echoes underscore the power of the orchestra on opening night of Ostrava Days

The biennial Ostrava Days festival generally only gets its wings after the first few days of programming. This year's edition included outdoor performances in public thoroughfares, a 12-hour marathon of experimental electronics and a concert of new compositions for an 85-year old, one-of-a-kind, retuned harmonium, all before the opening night of the festival 's lifeblood contemporary orchestral music. 

The opening night, indeed, felt like an exercise in the power of an orchestra. The Ostrava New Orchestra, comprised of some 60 musicians from 16 countries, was convened for the nine-day festival in no small part from graduates of the concomitant Institute. Rolling percussion and a dramatic cello line (played by Andrej Gál, one of only two soloists on the first night program) set Johannes Kalitzke's 2016 Story Teller. Here was the gravitas of Shostakovich with a bit of the playfulness of Kagel, making for an unusual and engaging contrast. Electronic augmentations and percussive playing of brass instruments, even Gál's finesse and alacrity, all seemed to exist in the margins. The text was in the powerful themes given to reeds and strings. Iannis Xenakis' 1983 Shaar followed in strong contrast with bold, unison lines (or “syllables”, according to the composer). It was almost blocky and here the large, glass and concrete room afforded a nice, subtle resonance. 

Timothy Page – one of three composers at the 2023 Institute intensive who had work presented on this night – crafted something intriguingly unsteady, more mechanism than sentiment. His Tensor (2014, revised 2013), nicely worked like a wagon with a broken wheel. Zihan Zhao's In a Bamboo Grove (2023) seemed another piece of storytelling, this one delicate, with shifting foci converging into a single vantage. Georgina Bowden's Wild Colour (2023) featured the composer's real-time wireless animation illustrating the slow, contrasting sections on a large, circular screen behind the orchestra. Her invention ultimately proved a distraction, or perhaps an entertainment in an arena where such things are undervalued. 

František Chaloupka had already had a piece performed during the soft opening – an operetta for two voices and four saxophones, all on bicycles, scooters and roller skates which, novelty aside, was an exciting quarter hour of music. His Allegory of the Cave II indicated a previous allegory, either Plato's or his own, and suggested the cave with echoing themes that grew in mass, the shadows ultimately overtaking their origins, ending with a burst of breath across violin bodies. His deft orchestration stood out where the narrative grew cloudy.

After more than two hours of echoes and stories, the concert concluded with a rarely performed piece by Frederic Rzewski. A Long Time Man (1979) is a set of 24 variations on a prison work song with an orchestral calendar. Pianist Daan Vandewalle played flamboyant runs and pounded chord clusters in a way that seemed unforgiving. Musically, it was enormously complicated, with many things going on, sometimes in sync and rarely for long. At some length, the trombonists started beating metal buckets, the percussionists dropped chains on timpani and a new section emerged to beat rocks with hammers as the strings flexed in expanding dissonance. Somehow the impression shifted from too much going on to everything going on. The orchestra, and music itself, we were reminded, is very, very important. 

Kurt's press trip was funded by Ostrava New Music Days