It’s time to introduce four wonderful ensembles who will premiere new commissions as part of the RenMus project this summer! The ensembles’ members will collaborate with each other as part of the international musicians’ exchange programme, aiming to rehearse and present an innovative musical performance.
Hashtag Ensemble is a Polish music cooperative specializing in contemporary music, improvisation and musical education, established in 2013. It operates by creating egalitarian structures based on multi-layered activities of its members and by building programmes based on legible and usually non-musical contexts. Intervention operations, concerts in the backyards of Warsaw townhouses or on the street are the foundation of Hashtag Ensemble rooting in locality and integration with small communities. An important element of the group’s concert practice is support and presentation of artistic achievements of women. Hashtag Ensemble initiates and moderates cooperations with new music ensembles in Poland and Europe and supports partnership builiding within the contemporary music environments – both musical and institutional.
BERG Orchestra from Prague has a specific mission of promoting new music and attracting new audiences to it. It performs not only at regular concert halls but is constantly searching for new spaces for contemporary music. It also mixes music with other arts like dance, theatre, visual arts, film etc. So far it has performed more than 200 new works commissioned primarily with the very best young Czech composers and given even many more Czech premieres by internationally renowned composers. BERG Orchestra has collaborated with the most important Czech organizations such as National Theatre, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague Spring International Music Festival, Strings of Autumn festival. It has created plenty of recordings for Czech Radio, Czech Television and for CDs. Educational projects form a regular part of its activities.
EnsembleSpectrum is a Slovak chamber ensemble specialising in the 20th- and 21st-century music. Over the years, its desire to present less well-known and entirely new works, whose mastery often represents both a mental and technical challenge, gradually became a passion and life mission, motivating the ensemble to always pursue a more daring and momentous dramaturgy stepping beyond the boundaries of music. The ensemble’s musicians studied at art universities across Europe, which has allowed them to enrich their performance with diverse approaches to the musical material. They are active as professionals in various orchestras both in Slovakia and abroad, as well as in various educational institutions. Since the group’s establishment in 2012, EnsembleSpectrum has performed over a hundred works of both Slovak and international composers, presenting over fifty world premieres. The ensemble regularly initiates the creation of new works, particularly through New Dawn, a project aimed at the young generation.
The Hungarian UMZE Ensemble was formed in 1997, in response to an initiative by music historian András Wilheim and Zoltán Rácz, Artistic Director of the Amadinda Percussion Group. In the last 25 years it has become a defining feature of musical life in Hungary, and alongside regular appearances at home, it has accepted important invitations to perform abroad, for instance in Berlin, Karlsruhe, Avignon, Zagreb, New York’ Carnegie Hall, at the Wiener Festwochen, the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Since 2005 the ensemble has been supported by the UMZE (New Hungarian Music Association), which aims to act as the spiritual heir to the New Hungarian Music Society originally founded in 1911 by Bartók and Kodály. Hungarian musicians of the highest calibre were involved in forming the Association, including György Ligeti, György Kurtág, Péter Eötvös, Ferenc Rados, Miklós Perényi, and Zoltán Jeney.