Kukal Ondřej: Fight for joy - CD

Composer, conductor, and violinist Ondřej Kukal (b. 1964) is one of the most significant and versatile Czech musical figures of the middle generation.

He himself described his Triple Concerto “Battle for Joy”, Op. 50 for piano trio and orchestra from 2016, composed on commission for the Kalliopé Trio Prague, as the composition that is currently most intrinsically close to him. From the very first listen, it is clear that it serves as a certain counterbalance to his Piano Trio from two years earlier, subtitled Battle with a Fall, which is a tempo-fragmented evolutionary passage blending the principle of gradual growth with the principle of artfully layered contrasts.
The opening section of the Triple Concerto, entrusted to the piano trio, emerges from a harmonic model rising from the depths, as if pushing some torturous weight before it. Subsequently, however, the musical stream begins to brighten and become coloured by a cluster of brass timbres. Against a solid rhythmic foundation, clusters of dancing figuration sections parade before us, alternating with unsettling vibrations (an obsession with tremolo) and then again with an insistent interplay of syncopation. The spontaneity with which this whole composition unfolds, almost symphonically broad in its sound, is perfectly balanced by a sense for the logic of musical flow and formal equilibrium.
This is achieved through five parts flowing at a slow tempo, the last of which, before the final, intensely spirited apotheosis of joy, acts as a hymn.

The recording of this work is a record of its 2017 premiere.