The repertoire of the concert featuring the Belfiato Quintet founded in Prague includes works for wind instruments. The artists will perform pieces by Leoš Janáček, a prominent composer of their native country, next to Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák,  by Janáček’s student Pavel Haas, as well as the more contemporary Five Poems for wind quintet by Karel Husa and Leporelo by Lukáš Sommer.

The Cunning Little Vixen is one of the most important works by Leoš Janáček, who counts among the greatest Czech composers. This opera was created in the 1920s based on the texts of fairy tales written by Rudolf Těsnohlídek to the drawings of Stanislav Lolek and is an expression of a specific adoration for nature. During the concert, the atmospheric suite from this work will be performed in Jaroslav Pelikán's arrangement for wind quintet. Then, remaining within the theme of fauna, the musicians will interpret Five Poems by Karel Husa, a 20th-century composer, who studied with famous professors Nadia Boulanger and Arthur Honegger. Each of the five movements of the piece was inspired by birds – their graceful existence is expressed on the one hand in melodious songs, and on the other in the ability to fly, bringing to mind the lightness of being. Husa illustrates these qualities, at the same time drawing maximum virtuosity from the wind instruments.

In Leporelo, inspired by a concertina-shaped booklet “the sound of the wind quintet is the harmony of five different instrument timbres. That’s why I started heeding small situations and small images, and that was the point where the atmosphere and style of the new work began to take shape. You don’t read Leporelo straight away. You like to turn the pages, watching the same plot over and over again,” Sommer emphasises. The concert will be crowned by Pavel Haas’s Wind Quintet op. 10. Composed of four sections: Preludio, Preghiera, Ballo eccentrico and Epilogo – the piece is also one of the few published during the composer’s lifetime. This quintet brings into focus a multitude of perfectly musically illustrated moods: from light, sometimes jazzy sequences to fragments with a melancholic tinge.