The Brno Contemporary Orchestra (BCO) will present a new themed programme, Six-Legged Heroes, on 25 November at Dělnický dům in Židenice, a venue known not only for concerts and theatre but also for long-running entomology fairs and insect-collectors’ meetings.
The location, where human and beetle culture have met for more than a century, sets the tone for an evening that connects the meticulously ordered sound world of insects with the imaginative chaos of human music.
The idea behind the concert draws on a long tradition of humans projecting meaning onto the insect world. BCO conductor Pavel Šnajdr said he has always been fascinated by insect sound production, from childhood stories of musical crickets to the surprising evolutionary fact that cicadas developed sound-making organs before developing hearing.
Composer Viktor Pantůček, the ensemble’s dramaturg, adds that while humans are tempted to see parallels between human and insect societies, the symbolism often reveals more about people than about insects themselves.
The programme features two world premieres, two Czech premieres and one revived work written for the orchestra in 2018. The evening opens with a new composition by Lucie Páchová, written for musicians placed around the audience to create a spatial “buzzing meadow.” The concert continues with Agata Zubel’s The Streets of Human City, inspired by Czesław Miłosz, and Heiner Goebbels’ Red Run, a work shifting between notation and improvisation, jazz, rock and free-form sound theatre.
After the interval, BCO will premiere Miroslav Pudlák’s Spirit of the Hive, based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s classic book The Life of Bees. The evening ends with Elliott Sharp’s Plastic Castle, originally commissioned by BCO in 2018 as a tribute to Franz Kafka, Egon Bondy and The Plastic People of the Universe.
Alongside the music, the concert will include an exhibition of entomological display boxes, featuring specimens from the Moravian Museum’s entomology department. These will be shown together with “Entomologické krabice,” a participatory artwork by Brno creator Jan Zuziak, who distributed empty insect boxes to fellow artists to reinterpret in their own way. Works by Josef Daňek, Jozef Cseres, Dalibor Chatrný, Jaromír Gargulák, Vladimír Havlík, Ivan Kafka, Jan Steklík, Václav Stratil and Zuziak will be on display.
Six-Legged Heroes is part of BCO’s 14th season, Outskirts, which explores the boundaries between reality and fiction and between human and non-human worlds.
More information can be found on BCO’s website.
