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New music meeting + and the international conference Musica Nova V.

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7 concerts, 5 operas, a series of lectures and seminars, 5 papers from 5 countries at the conference Musica Nova V, guests (composers and performers) -- from the USA (the most numerous), France, Portugal, Germany, Austria and The Ukraine... it was all just one more year of the "New Music Meeting +" festival held in Brno from the 24th of November to the 8th of December 2002.

This year's festival was unusually diverse, going beyond concert production to venture into the field of multimedia. The programme was partly devoted to guests from abroad (a recital by the pianist Vicki Ray, clarinettist Jean-Marc Foltz, and an appearance by the Portuguese Misso ensemble from Lisbon), and partly to domestic musicians (concerts from the Mondschein Ensemble, Dama Dama, and Ars Incognita, a concert of pieces by students at the Janacek Academy of Performing Arts, and a production of two student operas) as well as a Czech-American opera project that bridged the division between the two sides.

Together the concerts and other events offered audiences a wide and colourful spectrum of the possibilities, views, approaches and roads that new music is taking in this country and abroad. The festival ranged from virtuoso exhibitions of solo instruments to music theatre, to live electronic, performances by multi-member ensembles and the multimedia presentation of several chamber operas.

The festival opened on Sunday the 24th of November with a concert by MoEns from Prague. The group played pieces by contemporary East European composers. Lithuania was represented in works by Bronius Kutavicius, Nomeda Valanciute and Rytis Mazulis, and Estonia by Erkki-Sven Tuur's Architectonics II for clarinet, cello and piano, played by Kamil Dolezal, Milada Strasilova and Hanus Barton. From Russia Yuri Kasparov (almost) came to the performance of his Landscape running away into infinity and the concert ended with an already acknowledged "classic" 20th-century composer -- the Polish composer Henryk Mikolaj Gorecky and his Trombone Concerto op. 28.

The evening of Tuesday the 26th of November in the Goose on a String Theatre offered a mystical, truly theatrical performance by the Central European percussion ensemble DAMA DAMA. The group managed to knit together seven completely different composers (A. Parsch -- Magicke krajiny [Magical Landscapes], D. Dlouhy - Turbulence, A. Kubicek -- Flexibilni indiferent [Flexible Indifferent], V. Zouhar -- Petite sirene,...