In more than thirty years of their joint activity, Czech artists Irena Havlová and Vojtěch Havel have passed through several distinctive stages of development. They started to work together in the mid-80s, at the experimental Capella Antiqua e Moderna ensemble which won both public and critical acclaim. The repertoire of that unique association of musicians of the same generation, well versed in music history, spanned various styles of European classical music, ranging from the Renaissance to contemporary music, which they performed with extraordinary facility yet very convincingly, and within it the Havels, a husband-and-wife duo, were able to develop what since the very beginning had been a very unorthodox approach to both historical and modern compositional techniques and interpretive procedures. Labeling their music as an alternative, global, new acoustic, improvised, experimental, minimalist, relaxation, or meditative music, means classifying it in categories that very often actually tell nothing about its form and content. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that it is always music that is highly poetic and penetrates the innermost corners of a perceptive human soul, enriching it at the same time. The most important and most appreciated thing about the performers of this enchanting music is that the two musicians share their unusual gifts with their audiences with absolute sincerity and unusual humbleness, carrying a genuinely peacemaking message.
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