Pecková, Dagmar, Král Darek: The Magical Gallery - CD

An extraordinary artistic project connecting the worlds of tones and colours

The idea for the album The Magical Gallery, containing compositions inspired by masterpieces of world painting, was something composer and producer Darek Král had been carrying in his head for many years. However, he was missing the main thing—a voice that could portray everything necessary in the recording. Despite the apparent contradiction, he found the combination of an operatic voice and electronic music to be the most suitable and natural fit.
Dagmar Pecková was very much in favour of the whole project. The idea of having original music in her repertoire, compositions written exclusively for her, was also appealing. Other personalities from the world of classical music were also invited to the project: harpist Jana Boušková, cellist Zuzana Dostálová, the Epoque Quartet and tenor Richard Samek.

In his selection of paintings, the composer focused on the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and was inspired by the works of ten painters, in whose creations there is a clear fascination not only with painting itself, but also a distinct social aspect that influenced them. Another key to the whole concept was the idea of singing each composition in the native language of the respective painter. Thus, the album features compositions inspired by the paintings of French masters (Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Manet), Italian masters (Modigliani, De Nittis), and Austrian masters (Klimt, Schiele), with canvases by Vincent Van Gogh and John Singer Sargent also serving as models.
The lyrics for the compositions were written by Luciano Lagazzi, Guillaume Basset, Kate Hamsíková, and Radka Stahr, and the recording took place in the prestigious All Senses Production and SONO studios, with sound engineering by Štěpán Škoch.