Pianist/Composer Emil Viklicky with Burnett Thompson

Interview on August 27, 2023
The topic: American Voice of America broadcaster Willis Conover, who delivered jazz via the airwaves into Eastern Europe and elsewhere from 1955-1996.
The composer and pianist Emil Viklický made an impressive debut in 1977 with his Supraphon album "V Holomóci Městě". His synthesis of the modal approaches of jazz from the 1970 s was soon augmented by his study of Moravian folklore and, of course, the music of Leoš Janáček. His interest in this area culminated with his studies in Boston, and Emil Viklický continued to inventively combine jazz influences with compositional techniques from the second half of the 20th century and gradually moved towards opera and other areas of classical music, becoming a symbol of the ideal conjunction of the two worlds of popular and classical music.
From the outset, the influence of Janáček encouraged him to make full use of the approaches of folk music - not only its melodies, modes and rhythms, but also its tonal qualities. He avoided the pathtaken by other composers, who since the time of Vítězslav Novák had wanted to improve folk music and enrich it harmonically by introducing the complex chords of post -Tristan harmony into a world where they didn’t belong. Even though this kind of fusion might result in interesting artistic syntheses, Janáček’s course proved to be a much more productive one. It fully respected the music’s simplicity, rawness and often seeming “primitivism”, and found in it a source for its own “verism, impressionism and xpressionism”…
Of course, the temptation for harmonic enrichment also existed in jazz and since the mid-20th centuryhas had very notable representatives whom it would be difficult to overlook, and we will also hear it at some points of today’s recital - however, here it operates only as an additional source of inspiration.
Janáček has been an inspirational figure for a long time now, and Emil Viklický arranges and, more importantly, creatively builds upon selected segments or units of his work. At the same time, his is not a superficial search for rhythmic ostinato and “snappy” structures which lead directly to jazz stylisation. On the contrary, he searches for cantilenas and harmonically, melodically and tectonically interesting areas.
He produced a masterful response to Janáček’s Sinfonietta, focusing on a point which few people would have expected, and he did the same with passages from the second act of Jenůfa. Folklore connections are organically linked to the whole attempt at a synthesis of folklore, jazz and Janáček’s ideas which Emil Viklický has been developing since the late 1970 s. Over the past decade, however, the indisputable contribution of this contemporary composer and performer has also been enriched by his international career and the frequent presentation of these aspects among jazzmen and concert audiences in the West and collaboration with outstanding jazz musicians on concert stages and in studios on work of this kind ignited by Janáček’s legacy.
Miloš Štědron (2017)
Emil started to play piano in quite early age. His grandfather Victor Wiklitzky had brought from Vienna concert grand piano “Gustav Hoffbauer” as a wedding gift for his musically gifted bride. Emil was born in Olomouc, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), where in 1971 he graduated from Palacky University with a degree in mathematics. While a student he devoted much time to playing jazz piano. In 1974, he was awarded the prize for best soloist at the Czechoslovak Amateur Jazz Festival, and that same year he joined Karel Velebny's SHQ ensemble. In 1976, he was a prizewinner at the jazz improvisation competition in Lyon, and his composition “Green Satin” (Zeleny saten) earned him first prize in the music conservatory competition in Monaco, where in 1985 his “Cacharel” won second prize in the same competition.