Interview with conductor Marko Ivanović

You are recording a complete collection of Miloslav Kabeláč’s eight symphonies with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra (PRSO). When did you start, what have you achieved so far, and when will you complete the project?

The idea for the whole project occurred to me in 2010 and the reaction of the then intendant of the PRSO, Jan Simon, was more than accommodating. We did the first recordings in the spring of the following year. The Symphony No. 5, which will be played at this concert, is also the last one left to do. We’re planning to record it in the studio right in the following few weeks.

Do you have other plans with regard to how to help Kabeláč’s music on to the stage and into the consciousness of Czech listeners and perhaps also around the world?

I try to push Kabeláč’s work dramaturgically practically all the time. In my view, he is one of the most important Czech composers of the 20th century, who was greatly harmed by the period of normalisation and the Iron Curtain. His original style, which took shape during the 1960s in particular, was in step with the most progressive trends in European classical music in its day. I believe, however, that his music will succeed in winning over today’s listeners too, and that its significance within the framework of world musical development will be at least appreciated retrospectively. In any case, in the near future we will endeavour to ensure that our freshly recorded complete collection soon reaches music carriers too.

Do you recall your first encounter with Kabeláč’s work? When did it occur and what impact did his music make on you?

My first professor of composition, Jiří Kollert, showed me my first Miloslav Kabeláč composition. It was the Invenzioni for Percussion Instruments. I was 15 years old and a fresh student at the conservatory and I didn’t much share my professor’s enthusiasm for this otherwise great composition. It was an even bigger surprise for me then when after several years I got to know Kabeláč’s symphonic movement Mystery of Time. The piece entranced me so much that years later I graduated with it from the conducting department of Prague’s Academy of Performing Arts, and I later repeatedly performed it with various Czech orchestras.

Did it inspire your own compositional work? Is such a thing conceivable (or permissible?!)?

Miloslav Kabeláč’s style is pure and lucid, but at the same time hard to imitate. Kabeláč’s general ability to write music that was communicable and comprehensible, as well as, on the technical side, unified and almost mathematically conceived, was for me more inspiring. For me as a composer, the balance of “sense and sensibility” remains a yardstick that is hard to reach.

What composition are you working on after your biggest opus to date, the opera Enchantia, which premiered in January last year and is still enjoying great audience interest?

I’ve got to say that in recent months I’ve been focused considerably more on conducting than composition. Not so much from personal choice, but more due to coincidence and offers of work. I only get to composition sporadically, and then either as an arranger (a recent joint project with Jaromír Nohavica was a powerful experience for me) or as the writer of incidental music (I’m currently working on a new radio detective series directed by Aleš Vrzák). Recently, I’ve really begun to miss stand-alone composing. I’ve got an idea in my mind, but I think it’s premature to speak about anything concrete.

What are you looking forward to as a conductor in the near future?

Next month I start the traditional Easter Festival of Sacred Music in Brno with the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice. The programme is based on 20th century classics (Britten, Martin, Haas), though the compositions selected definitely wouldn’t rank as generally known. Again I will play the role there of a kind of apostle of musical modernity, which I seem to be condemned to… In any case, I really enjoy it.