A work by Jan Ryant Dřízal commissioned by Prague Spring selected for ISCM World New Music Days Festival 2026

Jan Ryant Dřízal’s Morphing Amadeus for chamber orchestra, commissioned by the Prague Spring Festival and given its world première on 30 May 2025 by Ensemble Modern as part of the Prague Offspring project, has been selected for the ISCM World New Music Days Festival 2026. The decision was taken by an international jury, which chose 70 works out of a total of 480 submissions by composers from 48 countries. The ISCM World New Music Days Festival will take place in Bucharest from 23 to 31 May 2026.

“This came as a huge surprise to me! I really didn’t expect it to happen, because Morphing Amadeus is in a way a playful reworking of traditional material. I even feel that the piece has a key signature, which these days can almost be disqualifying,” Jan Ryant Dřízal commented with a smile. “So I’m absolutely delighted, and I hope I’ll be able to attend the festival in person, although – as so often happens – I already have other commitments.” Morphing Amadeus is a musical tableau built from motifs taken from Mozart’s Don Giovanni overture. According to the composer, its conceptual model was the kinetic sculpture K by David Černý, better known as the rotating head of Franz Kafka. The work was commissioned by Prague Spring for one of the world’s leading ensembles specialising in contemporary music, Ensemble Modern – and the composer therefore “did not hold back in terms of technical demands or sonic imagination”.

Founded in 1922, the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) is a global forum dedicated to the development, dissemination and exchange of new music, and is a member of the International Music Council, an advisory body to UNESCO. It is a network of more than 60 organisations in around 50 countries. Prague Spring has been a member since 2016. In recent years, the same distinction has been awarded to Jan Dušek (2025), Michal Wróblewski (2024), Luboš Mrkvička and Jakub Rataj (2022), Michal Rataj (2021 and 2019), Miroslav Srnka and Jiří Kadeřábek (2018), as well as Adam Skoumal (2017).