About the ensemble
Požoň Sentimental is a middle-class chamber orchestra: flute, violin, accordion and piano. Founded in Bratislava in 1994 by members of the contemporary-music VENI ensemble, it has played ever since, in theatres, cafés, new-music festivals and on the street, music that takes humour seriously and seriousness with humour.
How it happened
“Požoň Sentimental” was originally the title of a concert by members of the VENI ensemble on 15 January 1994 at the Dúbravka culture house, during Music Solarium, Michal Murín’s festival of new and experimental music: one half was free improvisation after Cage and Feldman (that half later became VAPORI del CUORE), the other half were “humorous pieces spoofing the clichés of Central Europe”. Peter Zagar dug the word Požoň out of one of the forgotten transliterations of the city’s name Pozsony/Pressburg/Prešporok. Daniel Matej and Peter Zagar wanted “to convey something that never quite existed”.
A year later Ľubo Burgr asked Peter Zagar for music to accompany Jean Cocteau’s poetry at the Stoka theatre. They played Brecht songs, first on solo accordion, then with violin, flute and piano. That is how the quartet was born. Zagar added the epithet Middle-class Chamber Orchestra (malomestský meaning small-town but also small-minded). Players changed (Peter Celec and Robo Jurčo at the accordion), the line-up settled at the end of 1995: Ľubomír Burgr, Boris Lenko, Marek Piaček, Peter Zagar.
Marek Piaček and Ľubo Burgr began looking for fin-de-siècle scores: Burgr found a Lydian Hopak at the Prešov theatre, Piaček found the Trio from the March of the Hungarian Magnates by the military bandmaster Josef Striczl in the 1913 anniversary issue of the Pressburger Zeitung, and Dezider Lauko in Burlas’s history of Slovak musical modernism. One inspiration was Simon Jeffes’s Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
Call for Scores
In spring 1996 (and again in 1998) the ensemble sent composers at home and in neighbouring countries a Call for Scores: write us a piece of under five minutes, connected with the place where you live – regional rather than national, Central European. About twenty composers answered, from Ilja Zeljenka, Vladimír Bokes, Ľudovít Rajter, Juraj Hatrík, Ladislav Kupkovič and Pavol Šimai to Peter Machajdík, Martin Burlas, Iris Szeghy, Ján Boleslav Kladivo, Martin Smolka, Peter Graham, Hilary Jeffery and Christopher Fox. Thus arose a repertoire no other ensemble has: new music for the café and for contemporary music festivals.
Stoka, Prašná bašta, festivals
From the beginning Požoň’s home was Blaho Uhlár’s Stoka theatre, where the Dance Halls, Prepad, the Symphonic Metamorphoses, the opera The Last Flight and the subscription series Lapšanský in Stoka with Marian Lapšanský, Jiří Bárta, Magdaléna Hajóssyová, Eugen Indjić and Peter Mikuláš took place. The second home became the café-restaurant Prašná bašta on Zámočnícka street, where from 1997 and for more than twenty years the ensemble played its Soirées musicales over wine and the guests’ conversation. The third home are new-music festivals: Evenings of New Music, New Slovak Music, Melos-Étos, Exposition of New Music in Brno, Wien Modern, Konvergencie.
Between 2000 and 2005 the ensemble performed the Urban Songs cycle with Egon Bondy in Bratislava, Prague, Brno, Olomouc, Uherské Hradiště, Trenčín, Budapest and Vienna. It played in Gdańsk, Kittsee, Berlin, Strasbourg, London, Jihlava and Prague, and in 1999 grew for one evening into the thirty-piece Middle-class Symphony Orchestra.
It has released four albums: Venované Hansimu (1998), Urban Songs (2001), Prašná Bašta Social Club (2008) and Minimal (2010). In 2026 the Konvergencie festival called it legendary. We say we are a cult orchestra. Ask.
Požoň in a nutshell
No city in the world is as strange as Bratislava. Within a small area, cultures and languages mix, history with fashion, spirituality with the folksy. It bears features of a parochial town and a world city at the same time. Požoň Sentimental (Požoň – Pozsony, the original Hungarian name of Bratislava) emerges from the bizarre tradition of its city and develops it into an original poetics, combining fallen genres with cultivated artfulness. It continues the tradition of Pressburg coffee-house and street bands, seen however through the prism of New Music. Its basic characteristic is joyful music-making and an “indiscriminate” choice of repertoire, which extends from historical works linked to Bratislava, through its own compositions, to the recycling of the most profane hits and TV-series tunes.
Jaroslav Šťastný, 1998
Genius loci & Co.
- VENI ensemble (since 1987, Daniel Matej)
- Stoka Theatre (Blaho Uhlár, 1991–2006) → SkRAT, A4
- Penguin Cafe Orchestra (Simon Jeffes)
- Ján “Hansi” Albrecht and his house on Kapitulská street
- Egon Bondy and Epizóda ’96
- Pressburger Zeitung 1913 and Josef Striczl
Požonism
The aesthetics of the ensemble is an attempt to return to the basic function of music: a direct musical experience unmediated by intellectual construction. Music is no longer at the centre of interest; it becomes an object of everyday life. Neither music nor the composer is given a special status.
“Old Masters” tend to be tabooed: if you arrange, say, Schubert for a group like this, classically educated musicologists consider it a breach of the music’s aura. We, on the contrary, think it is an attempt to include Schubert in today’s discourse on contemporary art. With this in mind we also took a song by Michael Jackson and transplanted it into chamber music. In the given context of our instruments and the Central European environment it becomes a completely new piece with a message different from the original.
The originality of the material is not central to our thinking; context is. The material can be anything: old masters, pop music, traditional music, “stolen” music, recycled music, and music composed by the members of the ensemble. Art is a space where something “bad”, banal, senseless (kitsch, for instance) can be transformed into something positive, “good”, full of sense.
Ultimately we look for contact with the audience in a space “with no centre”, getting rid of attitudes which place one musical genre at the centre and leave the rest at the periphery. The process of arrangements, transcriptions, variations and recycling up to the final product can be very long, opaque and sometimes lasts several centuries.
A weather-sensitive listener feels, listening to Požoň Sentimental, as if the foehn were approaching Bratislava from the Alps: he wants to laugh wildly, yet experiences an almost disquieting nostalgia at the same time.
— Dr. Jozef Gejza Trinkerl: Požonism, or on the threshold of new musical crossroads (CD booklet, 1998)
(From the texts by Marek Piaček and Peter Zagar for the Melos-Étos 1997 symposium.)
The questions read at the premiere of Desirée at Slovak Radio Studio 2 on 26 November 1996 and printed in the booklet of the first CD.
- Is this the avant-garde?
- Has it no structure?
- Does it amaze me?
- Are they artists?
- Is it not an event?
- Are we in the right concert hall?
- Is the maximum of this music’s being when it sounds?
- Does the spirit of tomorrow haunt this place?
- Ask.
- Does this music concentrate?
- Can a musicologist add anything?
- Is it not some other time?
- Is anything more important than these questions?
- Do we hear music through the noise of thoughts?
- Will it accompany us all our lives?
- Is it not communication?
- Are we sure?
- Is it not by chance?
- Does it pull one rope?
- Has it atmosphere?
- Is this the beginning?
- Are they not vegetarians?
- Is it us?
- Is it not original?
- Will it change my life?
- Will the music fall apart by itself?
- Is this life?
- What makes all that noise?
- Is it food for thought?
- Am I here?
- Ask.
▶Je toto avantgarda? (1995)
Manifesto of the Middle-class Chamber Orchestra Požoň Sentimental
Dear friends, at the end of the 20th century the attention of the public turns to the question of so-called intercultural dialogue, to which Bratislava always was, is and will be favourably disposed. By its position in the heart of Central Europe, in the lee of Vienna, it is predestined to capture the collective psychology of various nations.
The overall philosophy of Požoň Sentimental thus consists in commenting on events past, present and future, provided they have some connection – however distant – with our city. It continues the pre-war and interwar atmosphere of old Bratislava, even the times when we shared one state with such historic cities as Trento, Trieste, Pécs, Sankt Pölten, Kutná Hora, Slavkov and Zakopane. Inspiration drawn from this heritage is one of our several points of departure.
In the course of the 20th century the Anglo-Saxon and American tradition merged directly with the tradition of our region in various branches of culture: philosophy – F. A. von Hayek, Wittgenstein, Popper; music – Schönberg, Zawinul, Křenek; film – Schwarzenegger, Olinka Bérová and others. Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, Luciano De Crescenzo and Manzoni’s The Betrothed are among the self-evident sources of the ensemble’s ideas. For Hungarian culture we could name the classic of film theory Béla Balázs, the master of modern classical music Béla Bartók, the classic of op-art and kinetic art Victor Vasarely and the classic of stress theory Hans Bruno Selye.
It goes without saying how favourably the extensive Strauss dynasty influenced the ideology of the ensemble. After such an intervention it is no surprise that the poetics of the ensemble radiates the power of personalities such as Mario Adorf, Igor Stravinsky, Aurel Stodola, Sinéad O’Connor, Jean Tinguely, Jan Železný and Hugo Portisch.
Thank you for your attention.
Read by Marek Piaček on the programme Metro (STV2) in the ensemble’s 10th-anniversary year, 2004. In the manner of the manifestos of the Futurists and other early 20th-century avant-gardes. Transcribed from the video.
▶Manifest MKO Požoň Sentimental
STV2 · Metro · 2004Požoň Sentimental – the text that describes us best
At the first encounter with the phenomenon of Požoň Sentimental the listener can fall easily into a trap. Is this what “New Music” is all about? Is it not just a student joke? A reaction to growing complexity and serious attitudes? Or is it perhaps an expression of the young generation’s neoconservative beliefs?
Alfred Einstein, the German musicologist (cousin of the famous physicist) once made a witty remark that “New Music” is never really absolutely new; instead, it brings a shift in attention on hitherto marginal features, which are stressed as central ones. PS involves several such “shifts of accent”:
- Accent on local tradition of small towns, as opposed to senseless attempts to follow world trends and copy the “city” style (computers, lasers, video, etc.)
- Openness toward the common listener who can find his favourite tunes (in a recycled form) on the programme – as opposed to arrogant and elitist attitudes of the “classical New Music” that does not even count with the audience.
- Obvious joy from performing, from simple music making – as opposed to “superhuman” virtuosity or conceptual amateurism (two extremes into which “New Music” has been divided).
- Acceptance of “old-fashioned” styles of the past and their integration into own expression – as opposed to deliberate hostility of all “New Music” toward everything that is old.
But the biggest value brought by PS – one which legitimizes its activity as truly new music – is its ability to teach us new ways of listening to music. One is somehow brought to a state of constant alert at their concert, because one never knows what to expect. Each piece is in appropriate contrast to the following one, thus even a common Konzertstück (like a short piano piece by Fibich or the original piano-duet version of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances) is perceived in a different way. Beethoven’s Fifth, stripped of its overwhelming monumental sound of the original orchestration, or the main theme from the TV series The X Files without its synthesizer layers suddenly reveal their “true” musical face – suddenly we hear more clearly what really goes on in this idealized music. At the concerts of PS, besides enjoying ourselves, we are thus forced to activate our listening habits.
John Cage presented his silence in the early fifties in order to highlight the existence of sounds. Today Požoň has come to say that there is still music.
English translation © Peter Zagar, 1998
About the author
Jaroslav Šťastný (1952), Moravian musicologist and composer (under the pseudonym Peter Graham), programmer of the Exposition of New Music, co-programmer of the Evenings of New Music. His Paris in the Rain (Požoň Sentimental Remix, hommage à Michael Nyman) has been in our repertoire since 1999. He wrote the text for our Mission Impossible concert in Brno on 5 October 1998.
Fictional collaborators and pen names
Prof. Miloš Henig, musicologist of the Small-Town Educational Agency, the composer Martin Hrivňanský (1942), author of Study No. XVIII/c, and the composer Ján Gruberus (1953), author of Imitations No. 6 for Three Voices, are invented characters. We signed with their names the texts that had no author, and played their pieces. Dr. Jozef Gejza Trinkerl, author of the essay Požonism in the Venované Hansimu booklet, is the pen name of the philosopher Jozef Piaček: “piaček” is Polish for a little drinker, so we translated the name into German – Trinker, with an Austrian diminutive. Everyone else quoted is, as far as we know, real.