Czech Counterpoints: Leos Janacek and Milan Kundera

Members of the Cleveland Orchestra Inon Barnatan, piano Introduction by scholar Michael Beckerman Reader to be announced Milan Kundera, who turns 80 in April of 2009, has always felt an affinity for the music of composer Leoš Janáèek, a fellow Czech. “Harsh juxtapositions instead of transitions, repetition instead of variation, and always head straight for the heart of things: only the note that says something essential has the right to exist. . . . My own imperative is ‘Janáèekian,’ Kundera has written. “To rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic verbalism; to make it dense.”

Though Kundera is unable to attend this celebration, he himself has chosen the texts—excerpts from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Immortality—to be read among performances of the music of Janáèek—“the composer I’ve admired passionately since I was a child,” Kundera once wrote. “One of the great figures of modern music.”.

Tickets are $10 for ages 35 and younger.

Date & Time: Thu, Feb 5, 2009, 8:00pm

Location: Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street Directions

Code: T-TP5MS03-01

Price: $19.00 / $10.00 Ages 35 and younger