Music Events
Arts at Noon Series: Grand Valley Winds
Date and Time
Wednesday, April 4, 2018 12:00 PM
Description
- Christopher Kantner, flute
- Marlen Vavrikova, oboe
- Gary June, clarinet
- Victoria Olson, bassoon
- Richard Britsch, horn
The Grand Valley Winds have been invited to perform in the Czech Republic at the Janacek 2018 festival this July. Today's program will feature works which will be presented at one of the closing concerts. Composers Leos Janacek (1854-1928) and Eduard Drizga (1944-2017) became synonyms for music of the Moravian region of the Czech Republic. Czech folk music and Czech language, more specifically the Moravian dialect, were inspiration for both of these composers. Janacek studied intonation and rhythms of the language and used these patterns in his music. Janacek's sextet Mladi (The Youth) was composed in 1924, during Janacek's return to Hukvaldy, a charming village where he spent his youth. A very expressive four-movement work, technical tour de force, features each instrument in its extreme ranges and dynamics. While Eduard Drizga's music is different, he was influenced by Janacek's music indirectly, by studying composition with one of Janacek's students, Josef Barta. Drizga's wind quintet is an arrangement of his earlier work (Violin Sonata, 1960). It was premiered in Austria in 1996. A few years later in 2010, our GVSU music students performed the US premiere at the Czech and Slovak Music and Related Arts conference.
Information
For more information, please visit: http://www.gvsu.edu/artsatnoon/
Contact
Office of Music, Theatre, Dance
(616) 331-3484