The Brooklyn Rail

Ostrava is an old mining town in the northeast of Czechia, very close to the Polish border. Its looming structures squat just outside the city, coal seams untouched since 1994, the gargantuan architecture now existing with a smudged, rust-red beauty and holding renewed interest for weirdo tourists with unusual sooty desires. Ostrava is the Czech Republic’s third largest city, but possesses a very low-key atmosphere of calm, well-suited to lonesome street explorations as darkness falls. It’s only upon entering a bar, or attending a festival concert, that we can view the populace, outside their own doors, socializing. Even the Ostrava weekends are strangely meditational.

The dormant mines are also home to multiple cultural venues, some of which are being used by the lengthy Ostrava Days festival, a smoldering furnace of new music with an emphasis on established experimental figures sharing an environment with emerging student composers. The program will typically combine old “classic” pieces with world premieres, separate days devoted to string quartets, vocal works, electronics, jazz, and improvisation.

Four days into the festival’s ten-day run, its Orchestra Opening / Compositions for Three Orchestras concert marked the formal beginning of the Triple Hall Karolina series. This massive converted coal-processing plant was the perfect space for an evening that featured three orchestras, three conductors, and four majestic pieces that were all composed since 1999, one of them a world premiere. If folks are fortunate to have witnessed any such a massive orchestral phenomenon, the occasion probably included a performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen for three orchestras, written between 1955 and ‘57. Indeed, that very piece was performed in this hall back in 2015.

The evening’s concept was to present four extended compositions that harnessed the fully exaggerated possibilities of tripled strings, horns, and percussion, with each conductor governing the relationships between the left, right, and central battalions. This was manifested in differing ways, as the evening opened with drone stasis, graduating to massed suspended shadings, then moving its second half toward more actively melodic cells of rapid development, climaxing with the epic manic maximalist unleashing of a new Bernhard Lang piece. The ONO – Ostrava New Orchestra manifested itself in its largest possible formation.

Phill Niblock’s Three Orchids (2002–03) invited our ears inward, using a string-heavy spread to suggest the sort of drone landscape that might also be created via electronic means. This was an organic incarnation, and something of an expected occurrence at Ostrava Days. Niblock was a regular attendee, and at 2023’s festival (OD transpires on alternate years) he was scooting around on his electric wheels, overtaking most walkers. Only five months after that festival, Niblock had departed this plane, but his presence is still felt by several of the regularly attending musicians and composers, resonating playfully.

Should we call this drone, or stasis-creeping? If drone, then Niblock’s immense, lingering tapestry involves one of the most intricate, layered, and monumentally evolving incarnations of gradual sonics possible. Tones hovered en masse, almost still life-d, as happenstance harmonies seeped. French horns, clarinets, trombones, tubas, and bassoons shimmered around the perimeter, ingrowing toward the blooming strings. Festival director Petr Kotík conducted using a slow windmill action, with stops at various arm-angles, also swiveling his palms in different directions. There were glimmering alterations of emphasis, having an uncertain grip, subtle flickers across the sound-swells. An urgent common tone developed as a collective church organ quality emerged.

Alvin Lucier, another recently departed figurehead, matches Niblock’s field during his Diamonds (1999), a sister work, but with more delineated roles for the instrumental palette. This was composed specially for the Prague Spring Festival in 1999, and performed again at the first Ostrava Days in 2001. Following the Niblock piece, there was a greater separation, with the horns having increased prominence. Glockenspiels called to each other from the left and right perimeters, then the center, as high and low strings oozed, mired in thin-paste rivers. The bells, the basses, and the violins were all in stratosphere freefall.

Kotík is the founder of this festival, his Variations for 3 Orchestras (2002–04) opening the evening’s second half, which had him joined by a pair of conductors, Peter Rundel and Johannes Kalitzke—one for each of the three orchestral wings. Percussion banks were added, and more horns, with this piece revolving around more distinct separations, with new palettes at certain intervals. The space was open at first, with a marked stereo separation, the demarcations of the three sections more evident. Ranks of pluckers were stacked, and some of the melodic frissons harkened back to Edgard Varèse, combining urban and natural sonics. A card-shuffling cascade flipped across the wide-angled terrain.

It was as if these four compositions were conjured as an epic suite, as each successive work had the effect of slowly amassing a unified sense of development. The premiere of Lang’s Game XXII For Ostrava represented an ascent toward an overdriven evacuation of distressed hyperactivity, invigorating in its swift growth of events. An abstract simultaneity invited a miasma of continuous suspension, as darkened low-end riffing cross-cut with complexity. High figures scuttled like maggots toward a milky osmosis. Two tubas stood tall, with mutes as big as buckets. It’s as if the entire three orchestras were soloing communally. One or the other became dominant for a stretch, as Lang encouraged levels of crazed emphasis that the listener would mostly find in the most extreme forms of rock. When the drumkits entered, the driving momentum intensified even further. Indeed, Lang visualizes the orchestras as gigantic turntables, ripe for scratching. This fresh work provided the night’s climax, and was quite possibly the most striking composition of the entire festival.

On the second night, New York City’s Mivos Quartet gave a concert at City Campus (the University of Ostrava), looking at the history of computer-influenced composition. Strangely, the program seemed to revolve around works penned with the assistance of random generation or algorithms rather than any more recent developments in artificial intelligence. The first three works were from between 1957 and 1968, the following three composed this year.

James Tenney’s Stochastic String Quartet (1963) holds a simultaneity of flow, moving through phases, liquid to obsidian by turn, from sour flourishes to low moans. Lejaren Hiller’s Illiac Suite (1957), probably the first score composed by a computer, sounds quite quaint as it scampers playfully, bright and fleeting in its progress, infused with optimism and dotted with joyous punctuations. Solo cello sang while the other three players issued quick flurries. In these surroundings it sounded somewhat old-fashioned, although in an attractive manner. It also sounded absolutely human, despite its computer foundation.

Two out of the three new works were disappointing, like mere exercises rather than fully realized compositions. Ian Mikyska’s Still, Not Still opens with solo violin, augmented by the other strings to craft a dronescape, as the first violin ceases and the baton passes in a round-robin. Mivos actually instigated an organic fade to escape this situation. Marek Krajnák went further downhill, making a piece that grew out of tuning-up, coldly breaking down into smaller outbreaks, and involving a petulant flapping and flipping of scores to create percussion effects. Anna Heflin transforms the atmosphere when her Play It As It Lays calls for the qualities of four individualists, their interplay blooming with substance, as they explore sympathetic pathways flecked by Arvo Pärt-ian characteristics, in consideration of existence itself.

The second part of the evening found Mivos joined by the pianist Daan Vandewalle for Divergence, a new work by Charles Ames. Dynamic key-shapes interspersed the string-flow, creating the feel of a rock performance in its tension-then-release qualities, Vandewalle matching, then emphasizing the Mivos spine-structure. We could almost call this riffing. In our heads, we grasped the time signatures that nearly exist, filling in our own song-edifice, divining its shape, as it made its halting, churning progress.

The power-curve rose even higher during the climactic end-piece, as NYC violinist Conrad Harris joined Vandewalle for Hiller’s Sonata No. 3 (1971), which is a radically different piece of music when situated next to his earlier Illiac. It was already established that Vandewalle has the individualist power to rise up onto a higher plane of dramatic expression, but it soon became apparent that Harris can coexist in this strata, as the pair sent shocks out into the audience in a hyper-performance of hard attacks. Harris stood, operating on a lusty, abrasive plane, harnessing the energies of free improvisation. For the second section, he downed his bow, doggedly strumming, as Vandewalle tolled with relentless demon power, wielding the largest furry mallet we’ve ever witnessed, leaning inside to strike the piano strings, eliciting a boom-doom reverberance. As engaging as the earlier parts of this evening were, this pair (with Hiller) proceed to dwell on a higher sonic plane of heightened action, deeply contained strength, and a hidden struggle with the complexities of this driving sonata.