Concert review: Tomáš Jamník (cello) Marek Švejkar (clarinet) Eliška Kopecká (dancer)

As part of its series ‘New Conections’, the Krumlov Festival presented a late-night concert of Bach and Boulez with a difference. The atmospheric location was a low-ceilinged cellar with accordingly resonant acoustics that assumed an almost protagonic role.

In Boulez’s Domaines for solo clarinet, the player is instructed to wander about the hall and play the piece’s various sections in an aleatoric order. Marek Švejkar’s unassumingly virtuoso interpretation was combined with choreography improvised by Eliška Kopecká, imaginatively lit in a way that made her shadow into a fully fledged dance partner.

Each section of Domaines was followed by a complete blackout, from which a movement from a Bach Cello Suite emerged, emanating from the candlelit corner where cellist Tomaš Jamník was sitting.

Prompted by the room’s generous resonance, Jamník chose adequately broad tempos. Applying his vibrato sparingly, he began the G major Suite with a neatly articulated Prelude, phrased in a historically aware manner.

In the following dances, the melodic lines that make up the implied polyphony were uncannily completed by the hall’s reverberation, which also enabled some daring caesuras in the G minor Minuet. The end of the G major Gigue segued seamlessly into the D minor one, Jamník subsequently performing the remaining movements of the D minor Suite in reverse order, always alternating with further fragments of Boulez’s Domaines.

The D minor Prelude’s concluding majestic arpeggios thus became the concert’s grand finale, sending the audience out into the balmy Bohemian night.

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE