VVO 2024: Jób - organové improvizácie, meditácie a maľba (Michael Koller/AT a Daniel Pastirčák/SK)

The festival will also continue on the eve of the 35th anniversary of the Gentle Revolution. On Saturday, November 16 at 4:00 p.m., an original concert will be held in the Evangelical Church on Lazovná Street. It will be a combination of meditations and art work by Daniel Pastirčák and organ improvisations by the prestigious Austrian organist and musical experimenter Michael Koller. The theme of this multi-genre event will be the suffering of an innocent person, based on the biblical book of Job.


Jób na Lazovná – organ improvisation, painting and meditations

Daniel Pastirčák is currently working as a preacher of the Brethren Church in Bratislava. He is also a successful poet, novelist and essayist whose literary works have won several important awards. In addition to literature, he also works for the theater and visual arts. He participated in book illustration festivals and exhibitions and exhibited in Slovakia and abroad. At the end of the 90s, he had solo exhibitions in London and Prague. He is also coming to Banská Bystrica, at the international organ festival Vivat vox organi, to present his artistic work. For his meditations, on the eve of the 35th anniversary of the Gentle Revolution, he prepared an image of the Old Testament character Job - a man suffering innocently, whose suffering is similar to many who were tried and persecuted during the communist era. The painting will be exhibited during the event and will also be part of Daniel's meditations. In addition to his artistic work, he will also share his spirituality with the participants of the event in the form of meditations that were created and were inspired by the Old Testament book of Job.

Michael Koller describes himself as a musical painter. Behind the organ, he discovers completely new possibilities for its sound. He experiments with the air and conducts a dialogue with the organ. His music is not formal, as if he paints pictures in a wide range of musical possibilities: from classical tonality to rough atonal passages. He was born in 1972 in Austria, after completing his education he worked as an organist in an organist's workshop in Krems / Danube. He is a graduate of church music studies in Vienna and in St. Pölten. His professors are Peter Planyavsky, Otto Kargl and Michael Kitzinger. He finished his master's degree in organ under the direction of Pierre Pincemaille and Rupert Gottfried Frieberger. He currently works as a project manager in Austrian television and is also a conductor and organist in several churches in Austria.