Word: kurka
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...coach was crying too," says Katerina. That coach happens to be her dad, Petr Kurka, Matt's father-in-law. It wasn't just a family thing. Around the shooting hall, even some of Matt's fellow marksmen got misty...
...second half of the program was a definite improvement over the first. Both the works had been played at previous concerts, and performances were generally brighter and more confident. The Wind Ensemble reappeared with Robert Kurka's Suite from The Good Soldier Schweik. This basically tonal work, composed in 1956, treads perilously close to eclecticism as it attempts to combine all the classic styles of twentieth century music: the playful dissonance of Prokofieff, the biting sarcasm of Mahler, a Milhaud-like use of jazz, and insistent rhythms at once reminiscent of Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein. Combined with the nearly...
...being particularly fine. With the exception of the oboe and the first stand clarinents, the woodwinds were sometimes painfully shrill, and attacks were not always clean. Perhaps because of inferior equipment rather than lack of playing skill, the percussion section did not have the clean staccato required by Persichetti, Kurka in the Good Soldier Schweik, and Barber in his Commando March...
...Orchestra of America, founded two years ago to perform nothing but American music, presented the world premiere of Robert Kurka's Concerto for Marimba. Composer Kurka, Chicago-born son of Czech parents, went to work on his 22-minute concerto in 1956 at the suggestion of Marimbist Vida Chenoweth. completed the piece a year before his death of leukemia in 1957 at 35. Last week's performance, conducted by Richard Korn, featured Marimbist Chenoweth as soloist. A small woman (5 ft. 2 in.), she seemed dwarfed by her instrument-a 6-ft. tablelike frame supporting a graduated series...
...this picaresque libretto, Composer Kurka composed an astringent score for brasses, wind instruments and percussion only, omitting the strings. Strongly rhythmic, shot through with jazz influences, it occasionally offered a wry commentary on the action, provided at least two moments of moving lyricism: Schweik's apostrophe on war ("Who will go to the war when it comes?") and the Chorus of Wounded Soldiers ("Wait for the ragged soldiers") in the final scene. But overall, the music was too fragmented to be effective, or to redeem the curiously Panglossed-over view that marred the libretto : the apparent belief that Schweik...