Jiri Trtik: World Premiere Tonight in Belgrade
Tonight the Czech composer performs Sounds and Poetics for the first time, a piece written as a musical response to photographs by Sudek and Funke, at the Czech House exhibition that inspired it.
Picture a stage small enough that the string players and the pianist nearly brush against a synthesizer, while behind them a screen cycles through black and white photographs almost a century old. There is no divide between acoustic and digital, no announcement that the “experimental part” is about to begin, just one sound built from both sources at once. That is the idea behind Sounds and Poetics, the piece having its world premiere tonight, September 4, at Czech House in Belgrade.
The Czech composer Jiri Trtik wrote the piece as a musical response to photographs by Josef Sudek and Jaromir Funke, two classics of Czech modernism. He composed it during his artist residency at the Czech Centre Belgrade, and the immediate occasion was the exhibition Pixels and Poetics, which pairs those same photographs with contemporary artists working with artificial intelligence and algorithmic image processing. The composition combines acoustic instruments with synthesizers, electronics and sound design, and in that sense it does not illustrate the exhibition so much as answer it in the same language the exhibition itself is about: translating reality through a new tool.
Trtik treats classical tradition as raw material for further work rather than a finished form. His opera Kafka’s Letter to His Father, inspired by the life and work of Franz Kafka, premiered at the National Theatre in Prague in 2024, and a Los Angeles staging is now in preparation. Tonight’s program also includes Vltava Recomposed, a contemporary reading of Bedrich Smetana’s symphonic poem, another example of the same move: take a familiar work and let it sound different from what audiences expect.
What a residency actually delivers, beyond a stay in another city
The director of the Czech Centre in Belgrade, Lucie Orbok, describes the project as proof that a residency is not just an administrative term for an artist’s stay in someone else’s city:
Projects like this show how much an artistic residency can be more than an artist simply staying somewhere else. They create encounters between people, ideas and artistic scenes, and something entirely new can come out of that. We are glad that Jiri Trtik wrote his new composition during his residency at the Czech Centre, and that its world premiere will take place in Belgrade.
That is not just a line from a press release.
The program backs up the claim on its own. For this occasion, the STRO.MY Ensemble brings together Czech and Serbian musicians: pianist Nina Honova, percussionist and vibraphonist Stjepan Hon, double bassist Filip Dokljanov and violinist Milos Stevanovic, and those connections were not built for this concert, they existed long before it. Trtik met Nina Honova while she was still learning Czech in Prague, her husband Stjepan Hon studied at the same school, and Trtik also met Filip Dokljanov during his studies in the Czech Republic, before Filip returned to Serbia to continue his doctorate. The composer names that personal history himself:
Serbian musicians have followed me through a large part of my professional life. I started playing with some of them back when I was a student in Prague, and today we perform together in Belgrade. That is much more than professional collaboration to me. The Balkans have always been a kind of warm, creative home base for me.
Why artificial intelligence enters a story about photography
The exhibition Pixels and Poetics: Sudek, Funke and the Impact of New Technologies on the Development of Photography opens the same day, from 6 to 9 PM, admission free, and it raises a question bigger than a fashionable topic of the moment. Orbok puts it precisely:
We often get the impression that artificial intelligence has brought something completely new to photography. The history of photography, however, shows that photographers have been altering, stylizing and reshaping reality from the very beginning.
That is where the exhibition and the concert genuinely meet. Sudek and Funke treated photography as material to be worked, not a neutral record, and by placing their work next to contemporary artists using algorithmic image processing, the exhibition argues the difference is one of degree, not of kind. Trtik’s composition makes the same move in sound: it takes an acoustic instrument as “historical” material and lets it pass through a synthesizer and sound design, with neither needing to justify the other.
The concert starts at 7 PM at Czech House, at Svetozara Markovica 79. Tickets cost 900 dinars, sold through Gigstix and at the Czech House box office. Unlike premieres billed as an event that needs no further explanation, this one comes with its own reason for existing, and that gives it an edge over an ordinary concert announcement: it is clear where it comes from and what it is in dialogue with, and all that is left is to hear whether the sound actually delivers on what the exhibition promises.
