Hand in hand with the Prague Spring Festival, the Prague Spring International Music Competition has taken place concurrently for the last 60 years. Since 1994, it’s been the tradition to commission a composition for each category of the competition from a leading Czech composer (e.g. Petr Eben, Karel Husa, Viktor Kalabis, Jan Klusák, Ivana Loudová, Otmar Mácha, Jaroslav Pelikán ...), thereby supporting contemporary music. For several years, Editio Bärenreiter Praha has been a partner in this competition, and has published the competition test pieces in its Prague Spring International Music Competition series. This consists mainly of solo compositions and chamber music works; this year, however, the test piece for clarinet was Clarinettino op. 11 (1990) by Ondřej Kukal.

Ondřej Kukal:  Clarinettino. Concertino for clarinet and strings, op. 11

The composer, conductor and violinist Ondřej Kukal (b. 1964) is one of the most outstanding artistic personalities of the middle generation in the Czech Republic. He is a graduate of the Prague Conservatory and the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He studied violin with Josef Vlach, composition with Jindřich Field and conducting with Vladimír Válek.

Kukal’s Clarinettino was first performed at the Festival “Junges Podium” in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic in 1994, and has become a popular repertoire piece. It’s a playful, virtuoso twelve-minute sequence, through-composed as a single movement, with variations in tempo coming from contrasting faster and freer parts. A characteristic syncopated rhythm and the repeated return of the figurative basic theme in different variations run through the whole piece. In the slower sections, the writing for violin as well as the solo instrument is predominantly expressive, and both instruments outdo each other in cantilena passages. The clarinet part demands a technically well-versed player, but the composer writes using traditional instrumental technique, without experimentation. The work can also be performed in a chamber version with accompaniment for string quartet and double bass (CD recording: Ludmila Peterková and the New Vlach Quartet, MusicVars 1995). EBP

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I first encountered Ondřej Kukal’s composition about a year ago when I heard a recording of it by Ludmila Peterková, the dedicatee of the work. Clarinettino fascinated me with its almost jazz-like elements. The piece is really witty with many descriptive parts. For the listener, it’s communicative and comprehensible, yet for the player it’s certainly quite demanding. The composer himself has admitted that, as a violinist, he hasn’t allowed the wind player anywhere to breathe or relax. From the technical point of view, it doesn’t have any particularly difficult passages, but when learning it from memory, several of the understated variations on the original themes proved to be really tricky.

Jana Lahodná
Third prize-winner in the clarinet category
from: takte 2/2008