As already a couple of times in the past, this year of the Prague Spring festival, too, decided to hold one of its concerts at the National Technical Museum. In collaboration with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague, it presented a programme consisting of four pieces by contemporary composers, all of which, in one way or another, make use of modern technology.
The main attraction was undoubtedly the world premiere of Jan Trojan’s Circulation which was written on the festival’s commission. Here, besides live musicians and electronics, Trojan makes use of “robotized” loudspeakers, a sort of little cars that were driving around the audience during the piece. The other compositions included a purely electronic Sentencless Sentence by Michal Rataj, Steve Reich’s famous New York Counterpoint from 1985 which combines solo clarinet (played by the excellent Karel Dohnal) with a jumble of pre-recorded ones, and Bagatellen, a duet for violin and sampler by Heiner Goebbels, which was performed by David Danel and Sylva Smejkalová.
29 May 2017, National Technical Museum, Prague
Prague Spring
“Musico-technical inventions”
Jan Trojan: Circulation (world premiere)