The theatre hall of Dělnický dům (Workers’ House) in the Brno district of Židenice has, for more than a century, been a place where the worlds of people and beetles meet. Concerts and theatre performances alternate here with entomological fairs and gatherings of lovers of beetles, butterflies, bees and other insects. It is for this reason that the Brno Contemporary Orchestra will present the concert Šestinozí bohatýři (“Six-Legged Warriors”), offering a meeting point between the structured, pragmatic sound world of insects and the chaos, freedom and democratic spirit of human music. The concert will feature two world premieres, two Czech premieres, and one revival of a work originally written for the BCO in 2018.
"When I was little and listened to on the record player to Ferda the Ant, where the Cricket was a musician and the radio tuned in to the station of cicadas, I loved imagining how a cicada—unburdened by human tradition—might compose. At the time I had no idea that cicadas first evolved tiny combs on their legs to make sound, and only later evolved hearing organs. Music, after all, remains an exclusively human domain," says BCO conductor Pavel Šnajdr. The concert is scheduled for 25 November 2025 at 7:00 p.m. in Dělnický dům Židenice.
The evening will open with a new work by Lucie Páchová, surrounding listeners with spatial sound reminiscent of a murmuring meadow, created by musicians unusually positioned around the audience. Polish composer Agata Zubel will bring the bustle of the human city onto the concert platform in her composition The Streets of Human City, inspired by the poetry of Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz. A dramatic contrast follows in Heiner Goebbels’ Red Run –an unrelenting stream of music theatre somewhere between the notated and the improvised, between café jazz, club rock and the undefined chaos of autonomous music.
“Parallels between the insect world and the human world are seductive – but butterflies do not dance, and dung beetles don’t push Sisyphus’ boulders. It is people who complicate or enrich their lives with these impractical activities. In any case, the Czech word lid (“the people”) and hmyz (‘insects’) are the only collective nouns that decline like hrad (‘castle’) – and that must mean something..." adds BCO dramaturg Viktor Pantůček.
After the intermission, the premiere of Miroslav Pudlák’s new composition Duch úlu (“Spirit of the Hive”) will be heard, inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee and written on commission for the ensemble. The evening will conclude with American avant-gardist Elliott Sharp and his Plastový hrad (“Plastic Castle”) – a dark yet playful piece paying tribute to Franz Kafka, Egon Bondy and The Plastic People of the Universe. The work was composed in 2018, commissioned by the Brno Contemporary Orchestra.
To enhance the atmosphere of an inter-faunal world shared by insects and humans, the evening will include an exhibition of entomological display boxes containing real specimens, on loan from the entomological department of the Moravian Museum. These will be interspersed with Entomologické krabice, a participatory artwork by Brno bon vivant Jan Zuziak, who at the beginning of the 21st century handed out empty boxes to friends and fellow travellers to fill according to their conscience and imagination. Audiences can look forward to entomological creations by Josef Daněk, Jozef Cseres, Dalibor Chatrný, Jaromír Gargulák, Vladimír Havlík, Ivan Kafka, Jan Steklík, Václav Stratil and Jan Zuziak. Zuziak’s boxes are on loan from collector and philanthropist František Stejskal.
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