Adam Viktora: I don't serve up well-known pieces
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| (c) Vojtěch Vlk
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Adam Viktora keeps coming up with surprises. Even though he and his Ensemble Inegal mainly focus on historically informed performance of early music, paying particular attention to the Czech Baroque composer Jan Dismas Zelenka, he also embraces contemporary creation. He plays the organ, conducts, organises international conferences and other projects, and he is an amateur archaeologist to boot.
This is an excerpt of an interview which is published here with a kind permission of the Czech Music Quaterly magazine 1/2017.
Was it you or Gabriela who came up with the ensemble’s
name?
The first work Ensemble Inegal recorded was Antonin
Dvořák’s Mass in D major, Op. 86, “Lužany”. Your subsequent albums are
primarily dominated by early music. Why did you start off with Dvořák, and his
Lužany Mass in particular?
For me, Dvořák’s Mass in D major was almost initiatory; I have a very personal relationship to it. Its attribute, “Lužany” is of immense significance, as Dvořák composed it for the consecration of a new chapel at the Lužany chateau, nearby Plzeň, that is, for a specific place, for a group of Plzeň singers and for the specific small organ, which is still there today. The composer confirmed it in a letter to the chateau’s owner, Josef Hlávka, in which he wrote that he had created a bespoke work for that particular space. While still a student, I was afforded the opportunity to give concerts at the Lužany chapel, playing the local organ, and when I was 18, I performed the said Mass by Dvořák with the Plzeň Cathedral choir. I was simply enchanted by the Lužany genius loci. The manor chapel has the dimensions of a large sitting room, with no more than 14 singers fitting into its loft, and the chambers in the chateau are still furnished in the manner they were at the time when Antonin Dvořák used to be a guest there. Spending a night at such a place is an unforgettable experience. That is why my student conception was entirely affected by my being familiar with the Lužany background, as well as a fair degree of an “authentically” romantic imagination. The Mass is intimate sacred music, and that is what I aimed to present to the listener.
Yet I first listened to a previous recording – I was overwhelmed by the monumental sound, an impassioned concept with an operatic touch. And I was appalled. That was my first encounter with the interpretational tradition that came into being at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, a tradition within which every single bar revealed that the performers had never visited Lužany, had no idea of the size of the ensemble that can fi t into the chapel, had no inkling of the space’s acoustics, nor the properties of Dvořák’s organ – by and large, they had no idea whatsoever what it is about. With both horror and enthusiasm, I then started to ascertain that a similar fate had afflicted virtually all the music I came across. Therefore, I returned to Dvořák’s Mass and recorded it with Ensemble Inegal directly at the Lužany chapel.
Four years after the Dvořák album, your third CD
featured the world premiere recording of the Czech Baroque composer Jan Dismas
Zelenka’s oratorio Il serpente di bronzo. Since then, you have gone on to make
world-premiere recordings of another eight Zelenka works, organize three
editions of the Zelenka Festival in Prague and two international conferences
dedicated to the composer. Your website bears the heading: “Discover Zelenka with
Ensemble Inegal”. Well, why Zelenka in particular?
Besides your Czech Baroque Music – Discoveries and
Surprises cycle, you have founded the Zelenka Festival Prague–Dresden and
initiated the respective musicology conference. What is the overarching vision?
The Ensemble Inegal repertoire not only features
Zelenka, it has expanded into all directions. Which of your non-Zelenka
projects would you like to highlight?
It almost beggars belief that in addition to leading
Ensemble Inegal you have also been performing as a solo organist, teaching the
organ at the Plzeň Conservatory, managing an organ festival. Is it at all
possible to pursue all these activities concurrently and still be able to
co-ordinate them with your family life?
This is an excerpt of an interview which is published here with a kind permission of the Czech Music Quaterly magazine 1/2017.
When did the organist Adam Viktora begin dreaming of
having his own ensemble, one mainly devoting to the music of Jan Dismas
Zelenka?
Before
I began dreaming of forming my own ensemble, I actually had one. Everything
went quite prosaically. Since I was 14 years of age, I had always had the
opportunity to head several choirs, with whom I pursued that which I found alluring
and of signifi cance, and I wanted to continue to follow that path. During a
performance of Rossini’s La petite
messe solennelle in 2000, I met the
soprano Gabriela Eibenova, who would become my wife. She and I started
immediately to plan our future projects, and soon founded together Ensemble
Inegal. At the time, though, we had no inkling that we would above all
concentrate on Jan Dismas Zelenka’s music.
It was
Gabriela’s idea. “Inegal”, meaning “unequal”, “uneven”, indicates that our ensemble
does not perform the music of just one or two stylistic epochs and points to
the fact that we appear in all kinds of vocal-instrumental formations, ranging from
three to 60 musicians. At the very beginning, we knew that we wouldn’t only be
playing early music, and the term “inegal”, taken over from the French Baroque terminology,
aimed to endow our ensemble with invention and a non-conformist approach to
seeking values in interpretation and repertoire alike.
For me, Dvořák’s Mass in D major was almost initiatory; I have a very personal relationship to it. Its attribute, “Lužany” is of immense significance, as Dvořák composed it for the consecration of a new chapel at the Lužany chateau, nearby Plzeň, that is, for a specific place, for a group of Plzeň singers and for the specific small organ, which is still there today. The composer confirmed it in a letter to the chateau’s owner, Josef Hlávka, in which he wrote that he had created a bespoke work for that particular space. While still a student, I was afforded the opportunity to give concerts at the Lužany chapel, playing the local organ, and when I was 18, I performed the said Mass by Dvořák with the Plzeň Cathedral choir. I was simply enchanted by the Lužany genius loci. The manor chapel has the dimensions of a large sitting room, with no more than 14 singers fitting into its loft, and the chambers in the chateau are still furnished in the manner they were at the time when Antonin Dvořák used to be a guest there. Spending a night at such a place is an unforgettable experience. That is why my student conception was entirely affected by my being familiar with the Lužany background, as well as a fair degree of an “authentically” romantic imagination. The Mass is intimate sacred music, and that is what I aimed to present to the listener.
Yet I first listened to a previous recording – I was overwhelmed by the monumental sound, an impassioned concept with an operatic touch. And I was appalled. That was my first encounter with the interpretational tradition that came into being at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, a tradition within which every single bar revealed that the performers had never visited Lužany, had no idea of the size of the ensemble that can fi t into the chapel, had no inkling of the space’s acoustics, nor the properties of Dvořák’s organ – by and large, they had no idea whatsoever what it is about. With both horror and enthusiasm, I then started to ascertain that a similar fate had afflicted virtually all the music I came across. Therefore, I returned to Dvořák’s Mass and recorded it with Ensemble Inegal directly at the Lužany chapel.
The
answer is simple. I regard Jan Dismas Zelenka as the very finest Baroque
composer, representing a totally original value, a value incomparable with
anything and anyone. That is how I perceive him, and that’s why I pay so much
attention to him. His idiom is the closest to me, his energy raises me from the
chair, the profundity of his ideas uplifts my spirit, and his compositional
mastery completely floors me. And there are also emotions, yet they are difficult
to talk about.
Have
you heard the opinion that there is “too much Zelenka” in the Czech Republic? I
would like to know whether anyone in Germany has ever said that there is “too
much Bach” there. Yes, we are talking about two totally incomparable aspects of
Central European culture. Yet not only insofar as Zelenka is not the Czech
Bach, as he has of late, rather inaptly, been labelled – just as Bach is not the
German Zelenka – the respective extent to which their music is known starkly
differs. According to our own research, the overwhelming majority of the Czech population
have not the slightest inkling as to who Jan Dismas Zelenka was and what his
music is like. In respect to the fact that just a few Zelenka concerts are held
annually in the Czech Republic, as against the hundreds of performances of Bach’s
music in Germany, with the colossal difference also being evident when the
populations of the two countries are compared, the knowledge of Zelenka’s
oeuvre is patchy among connoisseurs too. The framework tuition programmes for
Czech primary schools do not include a list of recommended composers, of which
every person of even a modicum of education should be aware, while none of the
recommended indexed materials within the Methodological Portal pertaining to
these programmes contain Zelenka’s name. By comparison, Bedřich Smetana, for
instance, is mentioned there seven times, Antonin Dvořák occurs five times, and
both Bach and Handel three times. With respect to the fact that today Zelenka’s
music is being performed more frequently abroad than in his native country,
that the documentation mapping his work and the majority of music editions have
also been issued abroad and that all the theoretical knowledge serving as the
basis for us, the performers, has solely arrived from abroad, as things stand now,
I deem the assumption that there is “too much Zelenka” an outright infamy. Since
I feel greatly bound to Zelenka’s legacy, as well as grateful for the pleasure his
music brings to me, I have founded an international Zelenka musicology conference.
It has become a new platform for making public the results of the research
carried out by the contemporary Zelenka experts. At the same time, the
conference is aimed to provide an impulse for and kick-start the still paltry Zelenka
research in the Czech Republic. The epochal outputs from the first edition are freely
available online on the Clavibus Unitis website and have gone on to serve as
the basis for a new article on Zelenka and his work in The New Grove Dictionary
of Music and Musicians.
The patron of the two projects is the Australian
musicologist Janice B. Stockigt, the author of the monograph Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679—1745), A Bohemian Musician at
the Court of Dresden, and a leading fi
gure in the current Zelenka research worldwide. A curious aspect of the whole
matter is that owing to her former oboe teacher, a Czech emigre, who brought
along Zelenka’s trio sonatas to Australia and won Stockigt over to Zelenka, her
workplace, Melbourne University, has turned into a hatchery of Zelenka
scholars.
When it
comes to our recent projects, I would above all like to mention Alfred Schnittke’s
Requiem and the modern-time
premiere of Adam Michna’s The Czech Lute, the very first Czech song cycle. Furthermore, we
have explored the music by Samuel Capricornus, a virtually unknown Czech
Baroque genius, given a theatre performance with puppets and Baroque music for
children, and the Czech premiere of Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3.
I hate
it when I read in interviews that artists claim how difficult it is to
co-ordinate all their pursuits, yet they somehow manage to pull off the
balancing act, and that is why they are so good and admirable. I don’t think it
is possible to harmonise it all together, or
I myself am not able to do so. I either devote to the organ and Zelenka, or my
family, or archaeology. Sometimes I have the feeling that I’m going to lose my
mind, yet, fortunately, I am not on my own. I share work and family joys with my
wife. We have three children, and when I want to go ice-skating with our son, Zelenka,
the accounting of various grants, as well as this interview, just has to wait their
turn.
The organist, conductor and harmonium player Adam Viktora appears at music festivals throughout Europe, and lectures and performs
at international organ conferences. He also works as an adviser to expert
committees for the restoration of precious historical organs and makes
recordings for European radio and television channels. He is highly dedicated
to historical organs and to eff orts towards their conservation and promotion.
He is the founder and artistic director of the Czech Organ Festival and teaches
organ playing at the Plzeň Conservatory. He is artistic director of Ensemble
Inegal and Prague Baroque Soloists, with both of which he has given numerous
present-day premiere concerts and made records of the European Baroque
repertoire. As such and with these two ensembles, Adam Viktora has become in
recent years the most outspoken representative within the currently ongoing
process of rediscovering the oeuvre of Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679–1745), a Czech
Baroque musical genius.
Ensemble Inegal
The Zelenka Festival Prague - Dresden
© Dina Snejdarova
Czech Music QuaterlyEnsemble Inegal
The Zelenka Festival Prague - Dresden
