STYLE
Finding the Balance Between Personal
Life and Work Was the Biggest Win,
Says SHF Director Igor Františák
The St. Wenceslas Music Festival (SHF) is the musical love of the managerial life of Igor Františák,
the active assistant professor of clarinet at the University of Ostrava. Let’s review in brief the
challenges he faces in the organisation of such a grand festival.
You’ve managed to develop the largest festival of
sacred and early music in the Czech Republic in
a formerly strongly-communist region, which will soon
celebrate its eighteenth year. How do you perceive the
SHF development from your position as director and
dramaturge?
In 2003, my friends and I founded a civic association
that produced an annual music festival exclusively in
sacred spaces throughout the region. In the first year
alone, we presented an incredible thirty-one concerts,
which were met with extraordinary visitor interest.
Very soon, the festival gained recognition and became
one of the most representative music festivals in the
country. Since then, we have organised over 1,000
concerts and created hundreds of recordings, which
we are now gradually making available through our
YouTube channel.
Naturally, we have faced various complications and
challenges over the years, whether financial, existential
(changes on the festival team) and even of temperature –
where I decided after ten years of its existence to move the
festival date from October to September due to the cold in
the churches.
SHF is one of the premier cultural events of the MoravianSilesian Region and the City of Ostrava. Thanks to this
support, we were able to start year-long series of Musical
Journeys, presenting exclusive musical productions
ranging from classical music through jazz and folklore,
all in the most acoustically and architecturally interesting
churches, castles, and industrial spaces across the region.
In 2018, we organised 100 concerts to symbolically mark
the centennial of the founding of Czechoslovakia. In 2019,
we created a new Czech-Polish project known as Music
Without Borders, though it had to be discontinued due to
the pandemic.
In the time of ‘coronavirus cultural darkness’ you were
forced to make a major change, where you had to
transform the whole dramaturgy into a solely Czech
version. You couldn’t perform in front of a live audience,
you taught online. You admit to re-assessing your life – so
in what direction are you now heading?
The past period was really quite a test for everyone. SHF
is planned more than a year in advance, so we had the
whole seventeenth year already prepared by the time the
pandemic broke out. In April 2020, it became clear to me
that the situation would not be resolved quickly, so by the
end of the month I decided to convert the dramaturgy
to a purely domestic one. This move soon proved to be
‘visionary’, as I had the opportunity to approach the best
Czech musicians. Moreover, in June 2020 we created
a three-festival project ‘Connected by Music‘ to support
Czech artists in times of crisis. Our festival was one of the
few that managed to actually hold their concerts in 2020
on the traditional date, and in full!
However, my professional, but above all personal, life
changed significantly during this time. Although strict
government regulations cut me off from my active
musician’s life, I was all the more able to spend time with
my family, with whom I now live in the ‘wilderness’ outside
Ostrava. Now I finally feel a sense of purpose in my life.
Finding a balance between my personal life and a work that
is both my mission and my hobby, has been the biggest win
to emerge from this otherwise unpleasant period.
Mr Františák, thank you for the interview.
Text: redakce
Foto: Ivan Korč
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