The latest concert in the Exposition of New Music festival, held yesterday at Brno’s Besední dům, was devoted entirely to piano music. It took listeners into the fascinating world of spectral music, the instrument’s internal acoustic structures and the phenomena of resonance. To bring the instrument’s hidden transformations of sound and natural inharmonicity fully to the fore, two different types of piano stood in the centre of the hall: a standard grand and a modified piano, with rubber inserts and beaters placed among the strings.
The concert opened with Tristan Murail’s Cailloux dans l’eau (2018), performed by pianist Marek Keprt. Loosely drawing on Debussy’s impressionistic sound world, the piece is based on sustaining resonance through the use of the pedal, since the piano cannot sustain a tone continuously in the way that bowed strings or wind instruments can. Low bass notes were allowed to resonate under the pedal while rapid scales and trills sounded in the upper register, recalling falling raindrops. These were set against sharp dynamic contrasts ranging from fff to ppp. At the end of the piece, Keprt kept the pedal depressed until the final sounds had completely died away.
This was followed by Marek Keprt’s own Intermezzo I (2026). Keprt is a virtuoso pianist, composer and teacher, as well as director and programmer of the international contemporary music festival MusicOlomouc and artistic director of the Olomouc-based ensemble Lichtzwang. He studied composition and piano at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, has attended numerous masterclasses with leading musicians, and has a broad repertoire ranging from Romantic music and the Russian avant-garde to French repertoire and his own compositions. Performed on the prepared piano, the intermezzo used rubber inserts and beaters placed among the strings to create a hypnotic ostinato reminiscent of a ticking clock, with a subtle contrast between the bass and treble registers.
The programme continued with Murail’s deeply expressive tribute to Olivier Messiaen, Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire… (1992), performed on the standard piano. It began in the softest pianissimo, with chordal writing that gradually built through powerful sforzandos and fortissimos to the monumental sound of tolling, fading bells. This was followed by Keprt’s Intermezzo II on the prepared piano, marked by a striking spatial and timbral contrast between the extreme low and high registers and a dynamic range stretching from pianissimo to forte.
The first half culminated in Angry Birds (2017) by Daniel Oliver Moser, a former student of Murail, and the piece fully lived up to its title. Moser combined the competitive logic and aggression of the popular computer game with the athletic, physically demanding nature of contemporary piano playing, creating music of tremendous energy and drive, with abrupt dynamic shifts, broken chords and formidable technical virtuosity.
After the interval came the eagerly awaited world premiere of SPECTrail musí… (2026), performed by its composer Dan Dlouhý, head of the Department of Composition, Conducting and Opera Direction at the Faculty of Music and Dance of the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno. Dlouhý combined live piano with a pre-recorded electroacoustic layer incorporating musical and non-musical sounds, texts and scores, including acoustic realisations of frequency modulation. The result was a gripping and dramatic confrontation between the acoustic instrument and the electronic sound field, full of rapid glissandos, cries, extreme dynamic shifts from fff to ppp and an enormous registral range. At one point, a fragile single-line melody emerged in the upper register, accompanied by chords in the bass.
The evening continued with Murail’s La Mandragore (1993) for standard piano. The work refers to the medieval legend of the mandrake growing in the shadow of the gallows and transforms the dark stillness of Maurice Ravel’s Le Gibet from Gaspard de la nuit into Murail’s own spectral language. Built around a spiral of five recurring spectral chords, trills and timbral ostinatos, the piece demonstrated Murail’s exceptional sensitivity to the internal transformation of sound.
After Keprt’s Intermezzo III, which once again connected musical textures through electronics, leaps and extreme contrasts of register, the concert reached its grand finale with Murail’s Résurgence (2021). Inspired by the source of the River Sorgue at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse and by Liszt’s pianistic sound world, the piece unfolded as a dazzling sequence of triplets, broken chords, trills and turbulent figures, vividly evoking restless water, spray and shifting reflections of light.
The concert came to a symbolic and powerful close, as the final sounds gradually faded into the deep silence of the hall.
COMPLEX SOUNDS: PIANO AND BEYOND
7 October 2026 at 7 pm
Besední dům, Brno
Programme:
Tristan Murail: Cailloux dans l’eau (2018)
Marek Keprt: Intermezzo I (2026)
Tristan Murail: Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire… (1992)
Marek Keprt: Intermezzo II (2026)
Daniel Oliver Moser: Angry Birds for piano (2017)
Dan Dlouhý: SPECTrail m u s i ....... (2026), world premiere
Tristan Murail: La Mandragore (1993)
Marek Keprt: Intermezzo III (2026)
Tristan Murail: Résurgence (2021)
Performers:
Marek Keprt – piano
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