In celebration of Dennis Russell Davies’ 80th birthday, Maki Namekawa and Davies will perform Smetana’s MA VLAST cycle, accompanied by Cori O’Lans’ real-time visualisation.
Bedřich Smetana and Adalbert Stifter both dedicated their masterpieces to the description of a landscape that geographically, historically and culturally equally inhabits the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany.
Tickets:
33€ / 26€ reduced
This concert is included in the FESTIVALPASS+ and FESTIVALPASS+ holders therefore do not need a separate ticket.
This landscape stretches from the Danube to the Vltava, representing a common historical habitat as well as a vital cross-border ecosystem in the center of Europe. At a time when we are increasingly confronted with fear and rejection of the other, the foreign, we want to activate the great unifying power of art, music and literature. The 200th anniversary of Bedřich Smetana‘s birthday and his great work represent a wonderful opportunity to do so. Especially in the piano version, many passages of Semtana‘s famous cycle Ma Vlast acquire a nostalgic, fragile character, with the self-assured national pride of the 19th century giving way to uncertainty about where we actually stand, how we want to define ourselves as societies and individuals in the in this era. The visualizations for Ma Vlast are both an attempt to capture the special atmosphere emanating from the four-handed piano version and to provide a visual, aesthetic accompaniment. They also offer an artistic exploration of the use of generative Artificial Intelligence.
All images (with the exception of a few historical drawings for Tabor) were created with AI programs, using the original piece descriptions by Smetana and Zelený, landscape descriptions by Adalbert Stifter, historical accounts of the trial against Jan Huss in Constance, as well as conversations about Smetana’s music with ChatGPT. This means that all images are entirely imaginary, no matter how realistic they may often appear; they are the product of the imagination of the collective cultural repository with which the large AI models of our time have been trained and which they use as the basis for their generations, whether its text or images. They do not respond to our input with accurate facts but with similarities, sometimes very stereotypical, sometimes full of fantasy, with virtuous hallucinations. Just as Smetana evokes memories of a long-gone era in his music and descriptions, reviving myths and idealizations of history from the perspective of his time, these AI-based visualizations are another iteration loop of the ever-necessary reinvention and interpretation of our history and cultural identities.
Piano: Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies
Visuals: Cori O‘Lan
Selected texts by Adalbert Stifter