In particular, the musician Vojtěch Havel, who died this Monday at the age of 62, performed in a duo with his wife Irena Havel. With reference to his wife, producer and composer Petr Ostrouchov informed about it.
The work of the Havels consisted of a mixture of folk music and motifs referring to various cultures and instruments, especially Indian and East Asian. In 2017, they won the Czech Lion award for the music for the film Křižáček.
“For more than forty years of a joint musical journey, the Havels have created their own original musical language, which they used to appeal to listeners at home and during numerous performances abroad,” says Ostrouchov.
Their last joint work will remain the album Four Hands, which Ostrouchov released this May on the Animal Music label. It was their first after a fourteen-year hiatus. It contains almost twenty pieces in which the piano and organ sound sometimes together, sometimes separately, but always with four hands.
Repetitive motifs inspired by minimalism and layered melodiousness with a meditative character are typical for the recording.
“The news of Havel’s death came just before the beginning of the planned autumn mini-tour of the same name,” adds Petr Ostrouchov.
The beginning of the cooperation between the Havel family dates back to the mid-1980s, when the experimental formation Capella Antiqua e Moderna was created. The association performed works of European classical music from the Renaissance to the present.
Later, the Havels collaborated with the recently deceased singer-songwriter Oldřich Janota, and from 1990 they started releasing records with their own work.
Intensive concert activity took them abroad. Together with the avant-garde artists and theater artists Petr Nikle and Jana Svobodová, they looked to Africa or Japan with the performance Solstice.
In the first half of the 1990s, the Havel couple visited India three times and, inspired by the local folk and spiritual music, created an author’s set of four CDs. They have also made four films on the subject of the spiritual life of India. They continued their film projects with the musical-visual work Tajemná Gamelánie directed by Viliam Poltikovič. Later, they created the soundtrack for the full-length works Cesta pístem lesem by Ivan Vojnár or Otec by Lukáš Hanulák. They were also signed to a lot of short and documentary films or stage music for television or theater productions.
In their compositions, the couple used a variety of musical instruments, including cello, piano, viola da gamba, bells and Tibetan bowls. They collaborated with many artists, such as drummer Alan Vitouš, guitarist Tony Ackerman, flutist Jiří Stivín, player of Japanese musical instruments Vlastislav Matoušek, but also dancers Karel Vaněk and Eva Černá and artist Radek Pilař.
Video: Sample from this year’s album by Irena and Vojtěch Havel
This year, after a fourteen-year break, Irena and Vojtěch Havel released an album called Four Hands. | Video: Supraphon