The aim of the Piano Paris Prague Association, A3P’s creation is to raise at least 80,000 €, the necessary sum for the purchase of a second-hand piano of excellent quality, such as a Steinway model B, and to donate it to the Czech Center in Paris, for its Janáček hall.
Unfortunately, the Centre's current piano no longer meets the quality and prestige requirements of contemporary Czech culture and its heritage.
Symbolically, the crowdfunding begins during the Czech Presidency of the European Union Council (ends in December 2022) and will continue even beyond.
The new piano will be housed in the Janáček hall, which bears the name of one of the pillars of 20th century music, a genius of Czech music-for an exceptional artistic heritage, an exceptional piano.
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The many people who frequent the Center have long desired a new instrument. It is also a unanimous wish of Czech and French performers and musicians from all over the world.
The Czechoslovak state arose here in 1916 - 1918. The “Masaryk’s house” walls recall the memory of the statesmen Masaryk, Beneš and Štefánik. The music performed in such a prestigious venue requires a first-class instrument.
We draw your attention to the fact that this donation will not allow you to benefit from a tax advantage, because we do not have the criteria of general interest.
If the sum raised did not allow the purchase of a second-hand piano such as a Steinway model B, a less expensive instrument of satisfactory quality will be purchased. If the amount collected did not allow the acquisition of a piano of sufficient quality, or conversely, any amount left after its acquisition, would facilitate the holding of concerts or other franco-czech cultural events.
If you'd like to donate by check: payable to Association Piano Paris Prague, to be sent to the association's headquarters:A3P, 4 rue de l'Alma, 92400 Courbevoie.
Czech composer Kryštof Mařatka (* 1972), living in Prague and Paris, is one of the leading composers of the world music scene.
The uniqueness of his musical language lies above all in the connection of various contemporary techniques that stem from unusual and surprising sources of inspiration: prehistoric musical instruments and the production of their replicas, which he initiates, world ethnic music, the birth of human speech, improvisation and new compositional procedures. His collection of over a hundred different archaic trans-instruments, which he plays and which he uses in some of his compositions, is unique.
Czech roots are omnipresent in his work, and this wealth is one of the building blocks of many of his compositions, in which he recalls his native cultural heritage and, above all, develops it further.
As the author of compositions for solo instruments, chamber music, melodramas and orchestral and choral works, Kryštof Mařatka has performed at numerous festivals and concerts in Europe (Philharmonie de Paris), USA (Orchestra of St Luke’s in New York), in Canada (Toronto Symphony Orchestra) and in China (Shanghai Grand Theatre), where he received commissions for compositions and where he was invited as composer-in-residence.
During the Czech presidency of the European Union Council, he is the composer-in-residence for the 2022 - 2023 music season of the Invalides in Paris, in collaboration with the Orchestre de la Garde Républicaine. The Czech Television made a recording of the Czech premiere of his composition The invisible forest in June 2022 for the Art program, and in 2025 the National Theater in Brno will present the world premiere of his opera The Absolute at large, based on the work of the same name by Karel Čapek.
Born in Prague, she has lived in France since 2002. She graduated from Charles University in Prague, from the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales and from La Sorbonne Nouvelle. In 2009 she founded the Czech Film Festival in Paris, CZECH-IN, and later the Kino Visegrad, an agency for the promotion of Central European cinema and culture in France. Since 2011 she has been working as an expert for the European Union's Creative Europe programme and for the Czech Film Fund.
I arrived in Paris as a child in 1960. My father was English and my mother Czech, and we remained in close contact with my mother’s family, who remained in Prague and Brno. My mother always spoke Czech to us. My visceral attachment to the Czech language and culture, reinforced by the scarcity of possible trips on both sides of the Iron Curtain, explains why I pass them on to my children and grandchildren.
This would not have been possible without my father's great interest in Czechoslovakia and its language, an interest which first brought him to Prague by bicycle in 1930, and a second time at the end of 1947, as the Reuters' correspondent, where a young Czech student of English, my mother, informed him of the political upheavals, which culminated in the February 1948 coup. They were married a month later, before the borders closed for years.
My Czech grandmother Věra Hrůzová was Karel Čapek’s great love, a famous writer and journalist. She inspired his Princess in his novel Krakatit, as yet to be translated into French. Čapek is best known in France for his novel War with the Newts, and for his play R.U.R where the word "robot" was coined.
His Letters to Věra, first published in Prague in 1980, were translated into French and published 2016 by Cambourakis. It is a small, extremely interesting book, in particular the letter where the rejected lover imagines Věra’s wedding night with my grandfather Jožinek!
A retired rheumatologist, I can now enthusiastically contribute by organising the crowdfunding for the purchase of a high-level grand piano for the Paris Czech Center, upon Kryštof Mařatka's initiative.
And thus be able to perpetuate the bridge between these two cultures, a family tradition.
Please email carola@mailc.net
18 rue Bonaparte,75006 Paris
A3P, 4 rue de l'Alma, 92400 Courbevoie.France