Respect Festival, the most important domestic year-round world music showcase, will open on 13 May at the Akropolis Palace. This year's Respect Festival is dedicated to Karel Schwarzenberg, the visual designer is František Skála. The series of accompanying festival concerts will be kicked off by Erwan Keravece's project, which will present early compositions by Philip Glass from 1969 performed by an eight-member ensemble consisting of Scottish and Breton bagpipes and bombards, and the project of Finnish pianist Aki Rissanen, who will play a unique instrument called Omniwerk. The Respect Festival will culminate on 15 and 16 June with a two-day Open Air show on the island of Štvanice, where it returns after a long hiatus, with further accompanying concerts to follow throughout the year.
8 Pipers for Philip Glass
Early works of Philip Glass performed by Scottish and Breton bagpipes
Early compositions by Philip Glass from 1969 performed by an eight-piece ensemble consisting of Scottish and Breton bagpipes and bombards (a kind of pipes related to the shalmai). Philip Glass wrote Two Pages, Music in Fifths, Music in Contrary Motion and Music in Similar Motion after a trip to North Africa and India, where he was captivated by the dense colours of local instruments. The project’s author Erwan Keravec thus returns to the world that originally inspired Glass with his orginal setting of the piece.
A genre-versatile composer and player of the great Scottish bagpipes, Erwan Keravec from Brittany straddles the boundaries of folk music, classical music, free jazz, noise and incidental music. He belongs to the same class of trans-genre improvisers as his frequent collaborators, renowned experimental composer and visionary Heiner Goebbels and Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. His current projects include an adaptation of the iconic piece In C by American minimalist pioneer Terry Riley for a 20-piece bagpipe ensemble.
Aki Rissanen: Omniwerk Impressions
An extraordinary pianist with a unique Omniwerk instrument
The Omniwerk is a unique new instrument in which Finnish instrument builders Jukka Ollikka and Jonte Knif have combined two historic keyboard instruments – the Geigenwerk (or Viola Organista, originally the invention of Leonardo da Vinci) and the Lautenwerk (a keyboard lute of the Baroque era, a favourite instrument of J.S. Bach) into one new instrument. The resulting Omniwerk has two manuals – one for each “werk” – that can be played simultaneously. A remarkable range of sounds is created by the combination of the two manuals and an ingenious system of bands that allows the instrument to sound like a harpsichord as well as a string orchestra.
Finnish pianist Aki Rissanen has five albums to his credit and great success in solo piano competitions at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and La Defense in France. Although he originally studied classical music, he has always been interested in musical improvisation. Aki Rissanen’s new musical compositions for the unique instrument Omniwerk are based on two opposites: an older, classical sound reminiscent of the Baroque and Renaissance eras is combined here with minimalist influences and electronic abstraction. This combination gives Aki its distinctive sound and identity. Conceptually, it is bursting with originality: acoustic renaissance techno-madrigals meet minimalism, you could say. The concert will also include compositions inspired by fragments of Leonardo da Vinci’s melodies, which he wrote down in the margins of his sketches.
