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August 30, 2005

The wise man of Ostrava Days

Petr Kotik conducting JPO (Photo: RV)The wise man of Ostrava Days is Petr Kotik. This summer course with festival is his idea. These three weeks is his counterweight to the Darmstadt Summer course. I visited Darmstadt in 1996 (just as a visitor) and it helped to stay away from music for many years.

Ostrava Days just did the opposite to me. It validates my decision to return to music as a good decision. For what I have heard from people who attended Darmstadt, the summer course there is a large scale enterprise with 300 student composers who are in competition to get their music performed.

Ostrava days is a much smaller event (only 30 resident students), lasts about one week longer and nearly all students have concerts. The amount of students guarantees that relationships are easily established.

The concerts, the lectures, the meetings with Zsolt Nagy and the rehearsals for Louis Andriessen's La Passione felt as a warm bath.

I was even interviewed by Czech international radio after the performance of Blink Blink!

I heard that a lot of Czech composers don't want to come to Ostrava because Ostrava has the worst reputation of all Czech city's. Those people miss an important festival in a town that it is finding it's way up. I really like the town a lot.

I assume Ostrava days will continue to grow, and I hope it will be acknowledged by a lot of media attention and more and more new music lovers finding their way to the festival.

On the other hand I hope the organization will keep the amount of resident students low and maintain the fine selection of lecturers like Christian Wolff, Alvin Lucier, Zsolt Nagy, Petr Kotik and Louis Andriessen.

Petr Kotik gave an interview to Czech Radio in which he explains his thoughts about Ostrava Days.

This trip has been made possible by:

Posted by Renske at 19:47 UTC | permanent link