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While still a student at JAMU in the years of "normalisation", Petr Kofroň (1955) was one of the first Czech composers to attract attention with a highly original post-modern approach. His diatonic "endless" pieces from the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s showed that here was a composer with strong aspirations to become the enfant terrible of Czech music. In his second period he moved from this rather artificial naive style to pieces that were structurally more complex and also less easy on the ear. At the beginning of the 1990s he took on the direction of the Agon Ensemble in Prague, and since then he has composed in close co-operation with the ensemble, and indeed his music has been to a considerable extent tied up with it. This represents a certain limitation that gets in the way of the greater diffusion of his pieces, but is also an advantage in the sense that pieces are "made to measure" and the composer maintains complete control over their interpretation.
Under Kofroň's direction the ensemble changed its name to the Agon Orchestra and in the course of the 1990s appeared at numerous international festivals.
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