Kvinterna Again

Back in May fellow blogger Karen of the Empty Nest Blog (see Related Czech Links) came to stay and was much taken with the music of local group Kvinterna. She asked me to post about them again and so here it is. In July this year I enjoyed a concert by Kvinterna at the Minorite Monastery on Latran. I was sorry that Karen could not join me, she would have loved it.

The video above is my own creation of local frescos and the music is a song called Planka from Kvinterna's album Landscape of Sweet Sorrow - an album of Sephardi songs and Moravian folksongs (click on the arrow to play the video). The juxtaposition of the two music types works brilliantly and is typical of Kvinterna's style. In their own words they "have created the instrumental element in a highly individual way derived from the technique of Gothic painting". For more on this, visit their website . This has inspired my choice of images for the video. By the way Planka is a Moravian song about a crab apple tree.

Kvinterna

In my last post I wrote of the frustrating invasion of the ubiquitous pop and rock concert into the New Year's celebrations at Cesky Krumlov. But not all is lost - on Sunday at the Museum of Building Crafts, in Dlouhá street, the wonderful Kvinterna gave a New Year concert of "Ancient and Alternative Music".

Kvinterna is a local group fronted by singer Hana Blochova. The group specialise in medieval, renaissance Christian and Jewish music, as well their own improvised music, but basically their music has a wonderful spirituality and so much more suited to my mood at this time of year. For an example of their click the above link to Youtube.

My favourite cd from them is Landscape of Sweet Sorrow, which brings together songs of the Sephardic Jews and Moravian folksongs and shows the similarities between these very different traditions. For more about Kvinterna, visit their website http://www.kvinterna.cz. And if you want to buy their cds you can either visit Cesky Krumlov's classical music shop on Latran near the bridge, where the owner will, if you wish, soon be suggesting all sorts of other Czech musical delights as well as Kvinterna, but if you can't make it to Krumlov visit http://cdmusic.cz for Czech music at Czech prices.