Eva Šušková

In parallel with her pedagogical activities, the Slovak soprano Eva Šušková has established herself as a prominent personality of chamber and concert artistic life in Slovakia, not excluding various forms of musical theatre. In Slovak opera houses and on foreign stages, she has performed several important classical characters such as Tatiana, Desdemona, Rusalka, Suzel and Fiordiligi. She has also staged the monodramas Pierrot Lunaire and Erwartung by Arnold Schoenberg, The Raven by Toshio Hosokawa, Duke Bluebeard's Castle by Béla Bartók and the chamber opera Into the Little Hill by Georg Benjamin. She has also performed and recorded Hummel's Mathilde de Guise, as well as premiered seven original Slovak operas (by authors: Beneš, Kubička, Solovic). Eva Šušková has appeared as a soloist at numerous national and European festivals where she has collaborated with major conductors, orchestras and ensembles. She has recorded songs for Brilliant Classics, Phaedra, Dynamic, Real Music House, Slovenský rozhlas /Slovak Radio/, Hudobný fond /Music Fund Slovakia/, Hudobné centrum /Music Centre Slovakia/, Hevhethia, Pavlík Records and other labels. She has contributed to more than twenty CD recordings, six of which are profile albums. Her long-term profile also includes author projects and musical theatre performances. She has worked on projects with a unique artistic signature – Babylonská veža /Tower of Babel/, Shaped Songs, Symptóm: Dieťa, /Symptom: The Child/, Dvojhlas /Duet/, Duke Bluebeard's Castle, Očakávanie /Expectation/, Carenza di cadenza, (O)Hlasy /Echoes/ and Svadobná sieň /The Wedding Hall/. She also works systematically with the children's audience, for whom she has created the projects Človekofón, tleSKOKrik, and a number of workshops and music workshops. She is the recipient of the Tatra banka Foundation Award for Arts in the Young Creator category (2013), the Radio_Head Awards for the best album of the year 2015 in the Classical Music category, including several nominations for the same award in the Experimental, Classical and Jazz Music categories, and the Fritz Kafenda Award, given by the Music Fund Slovakia for exceptional artistic performance (2016).

Concert: Eva Šušková and Ivan Koska

The poetry concert is a concept that combines songwriting and poetry. Most vocal concerts face two main artistic problems. On one hand, they often tend to focus too much on the personality of the vocal performer himself – his vocal fund, technique or acting abilities, with the music itself to be sidelined. The intimate relationship between the music and the musicalized word, which is essential for the composer, does not occupy the place it deserves in such concerts. On the other hand, the basic assumption of a symbiosis between music and words is often not perceived. For the full experience of perceiving the poetic-musical symbiosis, the clarity of content is essential, that is through a well-followed original text with a parallel translation in the bulletin.

The poetry concert features two song cycles (Schumann, Ravel) performed by our leading vocal performer Eva Šušková with piano accompaniment by Ivan Koska.