Composition written to mark the 160th anniversary of the birth of Leoš Janáček

Leoš Janáček has directly or indirectly inspired a host of composers, both during his lifetime and after his death. His pupils and the admirers he still has to this day have all been faced with his legacy. One of those admirers is without a doubt the Italian composer Alessandro Bosetti, who has written a work commissioned by our festival for the 160th anniversary of Leoš Janáček’s birth.

Today, the 41-year-old Bosetti works in Germany as a multi-genre artist, composer and performer with his unique expressive elements and unmistakable voice. Today he is rightly spoken of as “One of the most unusual and interesting figures on the contemporary scene.” His compositions have met with great success at prestigious festivals in New York, Paris and London. Bosetti is one of the major artists who creating works for radio, for which he has received numerous awards.

For the Janáček Brno festival he has composed the work Notebooks for voice and electronica. Regarding his new work Bosetti says, “There is a very special treasure to be found at the Leoš Janáček Memorial: a collection of very small notebooks in which Janáček noted down his speech melodies. Each of these speech melodies, written down between 1904 and 1928, is in fact an audio photograph of a transitory moment.”

Bosetti has tried to bring these melodies back to life, and in his composition he gives us his impressions of what Janáček might have witnessed when he recorded these speech melodies. The atmosphere of the piece will certainly be enhanced by the diverse spaces at the Villa Tugendhat.

Pavel Petráněk

Alessandro Bosetti

Alessandro Bosetti is a composer and performer living in Berlin. He was born in 1973 in Milan. He is one of the most innovative artists of his generation, making use of radio technology in his work. He has created a monumental body of work made up of hybrid, text/sound and radio compositions for the main European radio and electro-acoustic music studios, for which he has won many awards.

He is also known as a concert composer and writes music for ensembles such as Kammerensemble Neue Musik and Die Maulwerker in Berlin. His upcoming collaborations include a new vocal piece for the ensemble Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart.

Although in recent years he has come to be known mainly as a solo performer, he has collaborated with musicians such as Sophie Agnel, Boris Baltschun, Günter Christman, Rhodri Davies, Axel Dörner and many others, and he has also released more than ten CDs.