David Robertson • Czech Philharmonic

“My mission is to make audiences love the viola just as much as I do,” says Antoine Tamestit, who has conveyed this passion of his to music fans all around the world.  Performing as a soloist and chamber player, the Paris native’s repertoire ranges from Baroque to contemporary. Such distinguished composers as Jörg Widmann, Thierry Escaich, Bruno Mantovani and others have written works for him. 

Antoine Tamestit’s first instrument was the violin, yet at the age of nine he was so mesmerised by J. S. Bach’s Suites for Solo Cello that he felt the urge to master a lower-range instrument. He therefore cursorily acquainted himself with the cello, but was not overly excited. When, however, he found out that the Suites can also be played on the viola, he did not hesitate and fully embraced the instrument. Love at first sight would grow into a lifelong bond. Taking lessons from Jean Sulem, Jesse Levine and Tabea Zimmermann, he soon won a number of coveted prizes (William Primrose Competition, ARD-Musikwettbewerb, etc.). Tamestit would perform on stages worldwide along with renowned orchestras (Berliner Philharmoniker, Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Orchestra dell’Academia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, New York Philharmonic, etc.) and conductors (Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Simon Rattle, Daniel Harding, Paavo Järvi, etc.).

Owing to his impeccable technique and rich tone, Tamestit has gained international fame. He plays the first viola ever built by Antonio Stradivari (1672), provided to him by the Stradivari-Stiftung Habisreutinger. “We have lived through a lot, and yet we continue to get to know each other. Initially, it was not easy. I think there are two personalities on stage. But today it is a symbiotic relationship. We constitute a single entity, helping each other to express ourselves,” Tamestit said in an interview within the Prague Spring festival, where in 2023 he held the post of artist-in-residence. He has collaborated with the Czech Philharmonic over the long term. One of the works they have performed together, in Prague and within a tour of Central Europe (with the late Jiří Bělohlávek), is Bohuslav Martinů’s Rhapsody, Tamestit’s favourite piece, which he has referred to as “beautiful, moving and ravishing”. 

He has devoted to chamber music too, regularly working with the pianist Emanuel Ax, the violinist Isabelle Faust and the clarinettist Martin Fröst. He is a member of Trio Zimmermann, whose recordings have received worldwide critical acclaim (highly lauded has been their 2019 album of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, as arranged by Tamestit). Moreover, he is a splendid soloist. He premiered Jörg Widmann’s Viola Concerto, a recording of which has received the prestigious Premier BBC Music Magazine Award.

Antoine Tamestit is also a sought-after educator, teaching at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne and the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris, as well as within the Kronberg Academy masterclasses. For over a decade, he has been artistic director of Japan’s Viola Space festival.

David Robertson – conductor, artist, thinker, and American musical visionary – occupies some of the most prominent platforms on the international music scene. A highly sought-after podium figure in the worlds of opera, orchestral music, and new music, Robertson is celebrated worldwide as a champion of contemporary composers, an ingenious and adventurous programmer, and a masterful communicator whose passionate advocacy for the art form is widely recognized. A consummate and deeply collaborative musician, Robertson is hailed for his intensely committed music making.

Building upon his dynamic association with The Metropolitan Opera, Robertson conducts the Met’s 2019/2020 season opening production of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, directed by James Robinson, and featuring Eric Owens and Angel Blue. On the podium for all fourteen performances of the opera, through early February 2020, David Robertson also returns to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to complete his 2019 valedictory season as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director with American and French music of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Robertson will continue to conduct the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in future seasons as the city undertakes a major renovation of its beloved Sydney Opera House.

In Fall 2019, David Robertson joins the newly formed Tianjin Juilliard Advisory Council, an international body created to guide the young Chinese campus of the Juilliard School, complementing his role as Director of Conducting Studies, Distinguished Visiting Faculty. In the 2019/2020 season, Robertson continues his prolific collaboration with composer John Adams, conducting performances of his opera-oratorio El Niño with the Houston Symphony. In addition to numerous international musical endeavors this season, Robertson returns to the Staatskapelle Dreden and Czech Philharmonic, and conducts the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, the New Japan Philharmonic, and, in New York, The Juilliard Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

In 2018, David Robertson completed his transformative 13-year tenure as Music Director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, where he solidified the orchestra’s status as one of the nation’s most enduring and innovative. For the SLSO, he established fruitful relationships with a wide spectrum of artists, and garnered a 2014 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance for the Nonesuch release of John Adams’ City Noir. Completing the historic Robertson-SLSO association, two final recordings were released in 2019: Wynton Marsalis’ Swing Symphony, with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, on Blue Engine Records; and Mozart Piano Concertos, No. 17 in G Major, K.453 and No. 24 in C Minor, K.491, with Orli Shaham, on Canaray Classics.

In addition to Sydney and St. Louis, Robertson has served in artistic leadership positions at musical institutions including the Orchestre National de Lyon, and, as a protégé of Pierre Boulez, the Ensemble InterContemporain, which he led on its first North American tour. At the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he served as Principal Guest Conductor. Robertson has served as a Perspectives Artist at Carnegie Hall, where he has conducted, among others, The Met Orchestra, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. He appears regularly in Europe with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunk, the Dresden Staatskapelle, and at the Berlin Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, the BBC Proms, and the Musica Viva Festival in Munich.

Robertson’s longstanding relationship with the Met Opera includes the premiere of Phelim McDermott’s celebrated Spring 2018 production of Così fan tutte, set in 1950s Coney Island. Since his Met debut in 1996, with The Makropulos Case, he has conducted a breathtaking range of Met projects, including the Met premiere of John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer (2014); the 2016 revival of Janáček’s Jenůfa, then its first Met performances in nearly a decade; the premiere production of Nico Muhly’s Two Boys (2013); and many favorites, from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro to Britten’s Billy Budd. Robertson has frequent projects at the world’s most prestigious opera houses, including La Scala, Théâtre du Châtelet, Bayerische Staatsoper (orchestra), the San Francisco Opera, and the Santa Fe Opera.

Robertson is the recipient of numerous musical and artistic awards, and in 2010 was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Government of France. He is devoted to supporting young musicians and has worked with students at the festivals of Aspen, Tanglewood, Lucerne, at the Paris Conservatoire, Music Academy of the West, and the National Orchestral Institute. In 2014, he led the Coast to Coast tour of Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra of the USA.

Born in Santa Monica, California, David Robertson was educated at London’s Royal Academy of Music, where he studied horn and composition before turning to orchestral conducting. He is married to pianist Orli Shaham, and lives in New York.

The American composer Steve Reich is the leading representative of periodically repetitive music which is customarily called Minimalism. This compositional technique, which originated in the 1960s in the United States, in its typical form uses minimal means of expression from the melodic, rhythmic and harmonic point of view and is characterized by an almost fixed pulsing rhythm and lengthy repetition of a single motif.

Reich was born in the cosmopolitan New York City, but because his parents divorced, he also grew up partly in Los Angeles. He learned to play percussion instruments, and later enrolled at New York’s famous Juilliard School to study composition (1959–1961). In 1963 he earned his master’s degree in composition at Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied under the avant-garde Luciano Berio. Reich in his youth fell in love with the drumming of black Africans, whose constantly repeated rhythmic patterns and specific instruments, such as bongo or marimba, fundamentally influenced his entire compositional oeuvre. In 1970 he went to study this specific kind of ethnic music at the University of Ghana in Accra. Later he also turned his attention to the traditional music of the Indonesian island of Bali as well as Jewish musical culture. It would be a mistake to think of Reich as an exclusively minimalist composer since he has employed many other innovative compositional techniques in his work. His most frequently performed pieces include the opera The Cave and the chamber composition Different Trains from 1988 for string quartet combined with recorded speech.

Music for Ensemble and Orchestra is Reich’s most recent piece. It was written two years ago when he was 82. The composer explains the composition as follows: “Here there are 20 soloists – all regular members of the orchestra, including the first stand strings and winds, as well as two vibraphones and two pianos. The piece is in five movements, though the tempo never changes, only the note value of the constant pulse in the pianos. Thus, an arch form: sixteenths, eighths, quarters, eighths, sixteenths. Music for Ensemble and Orchestra is modeled on my Runner of 2016 which has the same five movement form.

The Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartók (1881-1945) was born in Nagyszentmiklós at the border of Romania, Serbia and Hungary. He spent part of his childhood in what is today Bratislava. His activities of a professional ethnomusicologist and composer were profoundly influenced by the folk music of nations living along the Danube River. He collected folk songs from historically oldest sources, catalogued them, harmonized them, and even reflected them on the theoretical level. The melodic, tonal and rhythmic features of East European folk music became a rich source of inspiration for his own compositional work. He became one of the most remarkable composers in the history of 20^th-century music. After the outbreak of the Second World War, however, he was forced to emigrate to the United States of America, where he died in terrible material circumstances.

Precisely in this period of life Bartók started his Viola Concerto, commissioned by the eminent Scottish violist William Primrose, which he did not manage to finish. In August 1945, Bartók informed Primrose in writing that the concerto would be in four movements. However, when he died two months later due to a terminal illness, he left behind an incomplete short score of a three-movement composition with some sections only in sketches. Over the next decades, three attempts were made to complete this concerto. The version which is currently played most often was prepared under the supervision of the composer’s son Péter Bartók by the American violist Paul Neubauer. Despite the unfavorable circumstances in which Bartók’s Viola Concerto was created, the work is unusually fresh. Its great melodic richness and overall atmosphere are typical of the greatest Hungarian composer of the 20^th century, and we can be happy that the composition did not remain only in sketches.

Ludwig van Beethoven gave musical Classicism its crowning achievement in the pathos of his music, the selection of heroic themes and the use of unconventional means of expression, heralding in many ways the upcoming period of Romanticism. His symphonic debut – Symphony No. 1 in C major – still belongs to the Classical style and shows strong traces of the influence exerted upon Beethoven by his great predecessors, Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Unlike these two composers, however, Beethoven began to deal with symphonies later in his career, considering them to be an extremely important form to be approached with the utmost responsibility. This is testified by the total number of symphonic works composed by the individual representatives of Viennese Classicism – while Beethoven produced “only” nine symphonies, Mozart wrote 54 of them and Haydn nearly doubled this number. Beethoven started to work on his first symphony at the age of 29 (although he had noted some of the themes for it five years earlier), i.e., at the time when his hearing began to deteriorate.

The long, slow introduction of the first movement of this symphony eventually leads to a typically Classical main theme of a marching character. It is immediately followed by the more lyrical second theme played by oboes and flutes, interwoven with the strings. The movement develops further based on these two themes. In short, the entire first movement is composed in an exemplary and clearly recognizable sonata form with introduction, exposition, development, recapitulation and coda. The second dance-like movement Andante cantabile con moto has a sonata character as well. Here, Beethoven is returning to the mannerisms of the Mannheim School, i.e., to the ultimate musical source of the Classical period. Traditionally, composers placed minuet in the third movement of their symphonies. Beethoven proceeded in the same way in his First Symphony, but later, when composing his Second and Third, he replaced the minuet with scherzo. The third movement of his Symphony No. 1 in C major is actually an original symphonic scherzo as well (there is a lot more of classic minuet in the preceding movement). The unsettling excitement and the rather non-dancing character of the third movement contrast with its marking, which can be interpreted as Beethoven’s ironical comment on the established convention. In the final movement, after a timid introduction, a jubilant topic bursts out, to which the composer returns several times in the form of a rondo, while working with this theme in a way similar to the sonata form. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 is a child of the 18^th century. However, with some of its features, it already anticipates Beethoven’s original musical language expressing grave content, which he fully developed especially in his other symphonies, composed in the following century.