#Press Release: Ostrava Days kick off on August 21!
Publikováno: 19.8.2025
Ostrava, August 19, 2025 – Preparations are currently underway in Ostrava for the 2025 Ostrava Days Music of Today festival, which will feature up to 200 musicians from around the world. The unique 13th biennial festival of 21st-century music and 20th-century avant-garde music will start on Thursday at 6 p.m. – for the first time at FUTUREUM, a revitalized monument to the coal tipper and mill in the Lower Vítkovice area. The ten-day festival program, featuring twenty concerts and forty hours of music (August 21–30), will open with site-specific compositions by young composers who are part of the 35-member group of residents of the Ostrava Days Institute. They have come to the Czech Republic from 16 countries around the world. The series of concerts, including Saturday's Minimarathon of Electronic Music, will culminate this week with compositions for three orchestras and three conductors. The giant covered square Trojhalí Karolina will serve as the venue for symphony orchestras until the final day of the festival, Saturday, August 30.
Starting Line, Thursday, August 21
The opening night of the festival will take place in three parts of the new buildings of the Lower Vítkovice area. At 6 p.m. in Futureum, six resident students of the Ostrava Days Institute will perform their chamber compositions. All young artists will have the opportunity to present their work during the festival. The opening Open Call will feature flutes, tubas, saxophones, bass drums, and electronics. For example, Hungarian composer Emma Nagy from the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest will present a work that evokes the feeling of refraction and transformation of light in a dreamlike state. From 8:30 p.m. in the same space, Peter Ablinger's (who died in April 2025 after a serious illness) extensive composition Against Nature will be performed authentically by flutist Erik Drescher, who collaborated on the completion of Ablinger's extraordinary work: "the mysticism of enlightenment, whose calls and litanies lead to knowledge." The program Probouzení intonarumori (Awakening of Intonarumori) will be presented for the first time by the international ensemble EFNI. It will take place among tractors, plows, and seeders in the new Agricultural Museum (opposite Futureum). We will hear contemporary works for intonarumori: noise instruments of Italian futurists, created by eight authors from around the world.
Mivos Quartet+, Friday, August 22
The American string quartet MIVOS is currently based in Vienna and has accepted an offer to participate in a program of automatic and algorithmic composition. The first truly algorithmic composition, generated by a computer based on predetermined conditions, Illiac Suite (1957) by Lejaren Hiller, will also be performed. This cult work will be complemented by other compositions by algorithmic pioneers J. Tenney and H. Brün, and the two parts of the evening will also feature brilliant performances of current compositions by Charles Ames, Ian Mikyska, Anna Heflin, George Lewis, and Milan Guštar, in the presence of the composers. In this case, the industrial environment of the previous day will be replaced by the new chamber concert hall of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ostrava at Černá louka – City Campus. Pianist Daan Vandewalle from Belgium and violinist Conrad Harris from New York will also perform. Mikuláš Mrva will be in charge of the electronics at the Ostrava Days.
Minimarathon of Electronic Music, Saturday, August 23
The Saturday program will take place from 2:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. in the Lower Vítkovice area, in the above-ground and underground spaces of FUTUREUM and in the National Museum of Agriculture. Refreshments will be provided for the 11-hour event, as will specific sound systems for all four stages – from Manka Lustigová's ceramic sound system to Berlin's BUSS, optimized for extreme frequencies. This year's electronic music mini-marathon will feature 14 artists (curated by Martin Režný, produced by the Bludný kámen association) and will also offer an installation by Gerard Lebik. The Ostrava Center for New Music is contributing to the program with Miroslav Tóth's extraordinary opus Nemiesta, which, at the composer's request, will be performed in the cryptic underground spaces of a former coal mill. The works for string quartet and live electronics will be performed by the American Mivos Quartet. Thursday's intonarumori and this “electronic” day will be recorded by Czech Radio microphones.
Orchestra Opening: Compositions for Three Orchestras, Sunday, August 24
A grand orchestral opening – a return to the Ostrava Days of ten years ago, when three orchestras performed for the first time at Trojhalí Karolina (including Karlheinz Stockhausen's legendary Gruppen). We are now offering a new generation of listeners the opportunity to experience an extraordinary event and see what it is like to be literally engulfed by the sound of three orchestras playing simultaneously. The program will feature "drone" works by the compositional giants Phil Niblock (Three Orchids) and the somewhat gentler Alvin Lucier (Diamonds), as well as Petr Kotik's complex composition Variations for Three Orchestras from 2005. The highlight of the concert, and indeed of the entire festival, will undoubtedly be the premiere of Bernhard Lang's composition GAME XXII for Ostrava, which was created for this year's Ostrava Days. It should be added that Petr Kotik already premiered the concerto for three orchestras in 1999 at the Prague Spring festival with the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra Ostrava. Thanks to rehearsals with this orchestra in Ostrava, Petr Kotik realized the potential of this city, which gradually led him to the idea of founding the Ostrava Days biennial.
The Ostrava Days festival program, featuring compositions performed in world or Czech premieres, continues on Monday, August 25, with the participation of Pulitzer Prize winner Tania León, and takes place daily at the Cathedral of the Divine Savior, Trojhalí Karolina, the City Campus of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ostrava, and Ostrava's "Kitchen" in the abandoned Hotel PALACE, with a marathon of solos until one in the morning. It will conclude with an extensive orchestral concert at Trojhalí Karolina on Saturday, August 30, and the finale will feature Luigi Nono's intense, uncompromising composition Like a Wave of Strength and Light. Another press release will be issued on Monday, August 25
