Vladimír Merta duo (s O. Fenclem)

The cornerstone of Czech songwriting, Vladimír Merta, is celebrating his 80th birthday. He is supported on tour by his loyal friend, the pianist and guitarist Ondřej Fencl, who is half his age. After their adventures with bands, both gentlemen are returning to chamber concerts as a duo.

The Merta-Fencl symbiosis crystallized from a musical encounter, or rather a mistake. "Ondřej wrote an email saying he would like to send me an album by his band Hromosvod. I mistook him for someone else and replied: come to Kaštan in the evening, I have a concert there, join us," Merta recalls the initial experience from the spring of 2011. "We played for an hour without rehearsing. That can only happen to Dylan. Or me." The enthusiastically received performance then led to almost fifteen years of collaboration, with a good three hundred concerts to date.