The voices and stories of our world
The Summer Festival audience got a taste of the music of Ondřej Adámek, the artistic designer of the 2024 Summer Festival, when the 2023 Summer Festival opened at Porvoo’s Town Hall Square with Adámek’s composition Coups d’ailes. This summer, his creative thinking will be explored in greater depth.
The breathtakingly versatile Adámek draws on his long visits to different countries and cultures. He conducts orchestras and vocal ensembles, developing instruments to create a sound that transcends the possibilities of traditional instruments and brings together languages and cultures.
Born in Prague in 1979, Ondřej Adámek studied composition at the Prague Academy of Music and the Paris Conservatoire. He was invited to become an artist-in-residence by the prestigious DAAD Cultural Exchange Programme in Berlin in 2010 and has lived in the city ever since. During his long visits to France, Africa, Spain, Japan, India and Italy, he has immersed himself in the musical cultures of these countries. Play in different languages also emerges in many ways as a structuring element in her work. His Summer Music embraces countries and worlds with open arms.
Familiar with Adam
In the opening concert of the Summer Concert, Adámek will present a programme that gives a good insight into his philosophy as a composer. The opening Let me tell you a story is a work for female voice and ensemble, based on a text by the Icelandic composer Sjón (1962). Completed in 2022, the work is inspired by Korean folk music and the musical theatre form of pansori, in which the singer typically tells a story accompanied only by a drum. Shigeko Hata, the concert’s soloist, premiered the work in 2023.
A Japanese mechanical puppet gave Adámek the idea for Karakuri for singer and chamber ensemble: ‘Although I was quite far advanced in sketching Karakuri, I had not found my preferred raison d’être for its sounds and movements, which I had intuitively discovered in my experiments with my own voice and arm’, says Adámek of his 2011 work. “The pieces lacked a story, a red thread, until by chance I came across a 13-second video of a karakuri, a 19th century Japanese mechanical puppet.” The video prompted the composer to explore the connections between the singer’s voice and the arm. The mechanical puppet, the karakuri, is a bow and arrow that its maker can make work – with devastating consequences.
The closing piece of the opening concert , Whence Comes the Voice? from 2022 will focus on Adámek’s characteristic exploration and bringing together of cultures and religions. Scored for female and male voices and chamber orchestra, the texts of the work quote religious Sufi poetry, as well as texts by the Christian church father Augustine and the Jewish writer Etty Hillesum . The work is preceded by a selection of folk songs from the Nordic countries, Japan and Madagascar. Ondřej Adámek will conduct the concert.
In search of new voices
Constantly searching for new sounds that go beyond and beyond traditional orchestral instruments, Ondřej Adámek has spent years developing an instrumental installation he calls Airmachine. The mechanical device with rubber gloves, horns, tubes and valves of all kinds was built for his Körper und Seele (2014). Since then, the device has taken on a musical life of its own, being used and developed in new compositions. This and other instruments developed by Adámek will be explored in the short films of Friday night’s Suvisoito club night. Avant’s musicians will provide the sound for the evening.
The final concert of the Summer Concert can well be seen as a synthesis of Ondrej Adámek’s life as a musician. For the opening work, he has chosen the work Brief Requiem for the Poets and Prayers by the Spanish composer and sound artist Pilar Miralles (1997), which will be premiered at this concert. Miralles graduated with a Master of Music degree from the Sibelius Academy of Fine Arts in 2022 and is now continuing her studies towards a doctorate in the Academy’s DocMus programme.
Part of J.S. Bach’s Violin Partita in D minor (BWV 1004) serves as a gateway to Adámek’s solo violin work Fliessender Bach, a wordplay: the name directly translated means “flowing stream”. It is paired with Adámek’s three-movement concerto for violin and orchestra, Follow me .
“The score is based on the idea of relationships that develop between the ‘leader’ and his ‘followers’,” Adámek says. “Initially, the leader, all alone, utters a simple and powerful word, which the individuals begin to repeat, until the entire group of followers has repeated every word of the leader.” During the process, however, every word uttered is altered, distorted and mocked. Eventually, the followers turn against their leader. The follower, in turn, sticks to his original words until he is completely overwhelmed by them. Finally, the leader disappears.
Adámek’s fascination with the liturgical alternation of Christian services, references to a Japanese Noh theatre singer, a playful Inuit katajjag competition and Bach fragments are all part of the story in Follow Me. “At the end of the third movement, the soloist (leader) is driven from his seat in front of the orchestra, and the fury of the crowd forces him to retreat. The enraged audience has the last word, and the soloist is symbolically executed.”
Ondrej Adámek will conclude the 2024 Summer Concert with his compatriot Antonín Dvořák’s Czech Suite in D major. Inspired by Czech folk dances, the 1879 suite opens with a lyrical introduction, from which it progresses through a polka to a slow, 3/4 time sousedská. A gentle fourth movement, the Romance, is followed by a dazzling finale that has been compared to Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances. Perhaps Adámek will dance along.
Hannele Eklund
