MilanVodrážka

Six short pieces for four hands, written in 1988 as my conservatory graduation work. I lost the manuscript. I didn't lose the music — it stayed alive in piano teachers' classrooms for thirty-six years.

Ivan Čeredejev turned seventy and put on a concert with his band. I sat in the audience and knew one thing: I wanted to be part of what was happening on that stage. A year later, I was playing with them.

What do Gershwin, Bohemian Rhapsody, Caravan, and The Phantom of the Opera have in common? They all ended up in the repertoire of the Afrodíté ladies' salon orchestra. For four years I arranged music for the ensemble that, at first glance, had nothing to do with classical music — and somehow it worked beautifully.

Some songs existed in only one place on earth — the memory of a single person. In the mid-1980s I went around the villages near Piešťany with a reel-to-reel recorder and taped them while there was still time. It was a bit of a mad idea, but I now know that for some of those recordings, what we captured is the only record of the song that exists at all. Back then I had no idea it would one day lead me to a radio orchestra.