Aleš Březina

Aleš Březina was born in 1965. He studied violin at the Pilsen Conservatory and musicology at universities in Prague and Basel. Since 1994 he has been the Director of the Bohuslav Martinů Institute in Prague. He has published in Czech and foreign magazines and miscellanies a number of specialist studies about 20th century music, primarily concerning the life and work of Bohuslav Martinů. In 1998 he reconstructed the first version of Martinů’s opera The Greek Passion (the revision of the score and piano extract was published by Vienna’s Universal Edition), which was premiered at the 1999 Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria in a co-production with the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. Subsequently, it was prepared by the operas in Bremen and Thessaloniki. Březina is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Bohuslav Martinů Collected Critical Edition, he has prepared a host of compositions by this author for revised or urtext publications at Czech, German, English, Austrian and French publishing houses. Especially worthy of mention from the recent period is the urtext edition of the opera Juliette, or The Key to Dreams, which also served for the preparation of this work at Paris’s Opéra Bastille in February 2006. In the past ten years Březina has given lectures at conferences in many European countries (Prague, Bregenz, London, Paris, Brussels, etc.) and in the USA. He has organised several international musicological conferences in Prague and Bregenz, and prepared the presented texts for publication at Peter Lang Verlag Bern and Peter Lang Verlag Berlin. He is also the co-author of and guide to two documentary films (directed by Jiří Nekvasil) – Bohuslav Martinů: Return from Exile (Czech Television 1998) and Martinů and America (Czech Television 2000). He has repeatedly collaborated with Austria’s TV ORF and the culture channel 3SAT, for which he has compiled programmes on Martinů and The Greek Passion (1999), The Golden Cockerel Rimsky-Korsakov (2000), Juliette by Martinů (2002), and The Cunning Little Vixen by Janáček (2003). In addition, he has also translated the libretto of the opera Juliette, or The Key to Dreams into German (together with Dietfried Bernet, Bregenzer Festspiele 2002) and the opera The Greek Passion into Czech (National Theatre 2006). Since 1995 Březina has been the programme director of Prague’s Bohuslav Martinů Festival, from which he has annually released a non-commercial CD. In 2005 he created the music dramaturgy of the Czech National Day and the Czech National Week at the EXPO 2005 world exhibition in Aichi, Japan. Between 2004 and 2007 he prepared the dramaturgy of the Czech Dreams project, an international music festival with more than 100 concerts in 17 European countries. Alongside musicological and organisational activity, Březina has composed music for a number of films, theatre and television productions. Among the most notable are the films Knoflíkáři (The Buttoners, directed by Petr Zelenka, 1998), Musíme si pomáhat (We Must Help Each Other, directed by Jan Hřebejk, 2000 – nominated for the American Film Academy Award Oscar 2000 in the Best Foreign Film category, soundtrack by Sony Bonton Music), Horem pádem (Up and Down, directed by Jan Hřebejk, 2004 – nominated for the Czech Lion prize for the best music, soundtrack by Sony Bonton Music) and the music for the German film Through this night starring Corrina Harfouch (directed by Dagmar Knöpfel, 2005), Kráska v nesnázích (A Beauty in Troubles, directed by Jan Hřebejk 2006) and Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England, directed by Jiří Menzel 2007 – nominated for the Czech Lion prize for the best music, soundtrack by EMI). Released in March 2006 was a CD of the distinct Israeli chanteuse Chava Alberstein, Lemele, which Březina arranged and produced. In 2007 it was released by the Dutch company Rounder Europe. For the singer Soňa Červená, Březina has written a musical monologue A-ha!, which run, among other things, in a television documentary by Olga Sommerová, Moje století (My Century, Czech Television 2005). In 2007 he completed for Soňa Červená a full-length opera on the political show trial of Milada Horáková, Tomorrow There Will Be... (libretto: Aleš Březina and Jiří Nekvasil) staged at the Kolowrat Theatre in April 2008. Aleš Březina is a member of a number of Czech and foreign professional associations, the Artistic board of the international music festival Prague Spring and the National Theatre in Prague.Update: April 2008