Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra • Sebastian Bru, Josef Špaček

“It is the fulfilment of a dream we shared with Jiří Bělohlávek: after two years of preparations, we are ushering in concerts of the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra. This name does not stand for one particular ensemble; instead it represents a project in which the orchestra members will be performing in various chamber groups,” said David Mareček, Chief Executive Officer of the Czech Philharmonic, in the spring of 2018. Jiří Bělohlávek was convinced that it was healthy for the Czech Philharmonic to play in a smaller ensemble with a repertoire spanning the Baroque to the present, where the musicians can hone their intonation, phrasing, and collaboration as individuals within a whole group. The Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, consisting exclusively of the members of the Czech Philharmonic assembled for a specific occasion, was officially established in the Czech Philharmonic’s 123rd season. Since then, the ensemble has already prepared fifteen projects presented both during the orchestra’s regular season at the Rudolfinum and at festival appearances.

“Working with Josef Špaček is amazing. He is a wonderful person with good heart. You can feel this in his playing, which is gracious, teeming with emotion. And his technique is marvellous. He is one of the greatest solo violinists of the present time,” says the conductor Manfred Honeck, under whom the young virtuoso has regularly given concerts, in the Czech Television documentary Devět sezón (Nine Seasons) The 2023 film provides an interesting account of Špaček’s life, also shedding light on his nine-year tenure as the Czech Philharmonic’s concert master.  

Although not having been a member for four years, Josef Špaček has not ceased to collaborate with the Czech Philharmonic, pursuing numerous joint projects. And even though appearing as a soloist with celebrated orchestras worldwide and as a chamber player at the most prestigious concert venues, he continues to perform in Czech towns and remote villages. 

Josef Špaček is a member of the exciting international Trio Zimbalist, giving performances all over the globe. He has regularly appeared in the Czech Republic with the cellist Tomáš Jamník and the pianist Miroslav Sekera, with whom he has created critically acclaimed albums. He has also made recordings with the Czech Philharmonic (featuring Janáček’s and Dvořák’s violin concertos, and Suk’s Fantasy), the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Petr Popelka (Bohuslav Martinů’s music).

Born in 1986 in Třebíč, Bohemia, Josef Špaček showed his exceptional talent at an early age. Music was a natural part of his childhood (his father has been a cellist of the Czech Philharmonic for over three decades, and his siblings played instruments too), as described by his mother in the book Špačci ve fraku. After graduating from the Prague Conservatory 
(under the tutelage of Jaroslav Foltýn), Josef went on to study in the USA, where he attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia (his teachers included Ida Kavafian and Jaime Laredo) and The Julliard School in New York (tutored by Itzak Perlman). 

After completing his formal education, he returned to his homeland, where he was named the youngest ever concert master of the Czech Philharmonic. At the same time, he performed as a soloist and chamber player, garnering international recognition. A watershed in his career was victory at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, whereupon he began receiving invitations from the world’s most renowned institutions. Due to his having an ever more challenging and busy schedule as a musician – and to his family situation, especially following the birth of three children – he resigned from the post of concert master of the Czech Philharmonic so as to focus solely on being a soloist. Owing to his immense talent and great diligence, his childhood dream to become a famous violinist has come to pass.  

Sebastian Bru was born into a musical family in Vienna on October 24, 1987, and received his first cello lessons at the age of 8 from his father, Ricardo Bru, principal cellist at the Vienna Volksoper. He continued his study of the cello study with Krystina and Josef Podhoransky, as well as with Robert Nagy.

He augmented this work with courses and master classes from Clemens Hagen, David Geringas, Steven Isserlis and Heinrich Schiff. Already at a young age, Sebastian Bru dedicated himself to orchestral playing, performing with, among others, the Wiener Jeunesse Orchestra, the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and the Verbier Festival Orchestra. At the age of 18, he won an audition and was accepted into the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, beginning his service there on 1 November 2006, as a member of the cello section.

Having precociously procured numerous prizes such as at the Jugendwettbewerb “Prima la musica” and at the “Fedelio-Wettbewerb” and in addition to having served (season 2010/2011) as first principal cellist of the Vienna Symphony, Sebastian Bru made solo appearances in Austria, Europe, South America and Asia, performing with the Vienna Symphony, the Orquesta Sinfonía Nacional (Buenos Aires), the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, the orchestra “Spirit of Europe” and others. Among his partners in these appearances have been Rudolf Buchbinder, Ildikó Raimondi, as well as numerous members of the Vienna Philharmonic. Many of his concerts have been broadcast nationally and internationally.

His first debut recording “a deux” together with the pianist Stefan Stroissing was released in March 2019 at Sony classical.

Sebastian is playing on a Cello from Giovanni Battista Guadagnini which is loan by the Austrian national bank.

Janáček’s Suite for Strings (sometimes called Suite for String Orchestra) got a review soon after its presentation at the Beseda brněnská (Brno Beseda Society). Berthold Žalud, an important musical critic, in Moravská orlice daily newspaper (6 December 1877) commented on its pathos and emphasized that Janáček was “our artist, grown up from our midst”, “an artist so young and a composition so great”. He considered him to be “our” own because Janáček was born in Hukvaldy in North Moravia and got his education from Brno schools; his studies in Prague and at conservatories in Leipzig and Vienna were rather short. In 1876, Janáček became choirmaster of the Brno Beseda Society, to which he quickly added an orchestra appropriate for accompanying larger choral works. He composed his Suite in the autumn of 1877 and conducted its premiere at a Beseda concert. While the premiere won high praise and the reviewer Berthold Žalud found Romantic content in the composition, with the passage of time the Suite was viewed more as a beginner’s work influenced by Wagner, Skuherský, Dvořák and Smetana, and apparently Janáček himself did not value it very much.

The Suite for Strings is Janáček’s oldest preserved orchestral composition and as such it is far from his typical musical expression of his late period, but that does not mean that it has not its own qualities. It consists of six movements originally entitled Prélude, Allemande, Sarabanda, Scherzo, Air and Finale. Since these titles were from a different era, the era of the Baroque dance suites, when the work was published for the first time in 1926, Janáček indicated only their tempo markings. The six movements form a compact whole, in which the song form prevails, only the final movement is in sonata form. The popularity of the suite for chamber orchestra as a genre is documented in the 1870s by Antonín Dvořák’s Czech Suite, Op. 39, composed in 1879, which is occasionally coupled with Janáček’s Suite for Strings on the same label or concert program. Janáček’s emotional warmth and melodic line are able to withstand this competition.

We know much less about Concerto for Violin and Cello in D major, Op. 3 by Josef Rejcha. There is a confusion about the authorship of this double concerto: the composition is mostly recognized as that by Josef Rejcha (Joseph Reicha), but some researchers attribute it to Josef’s nephew Antonín Rejcha (Antoine Reicha) (1770–1836). Matěj Josef Rejcha, a native of Chudenice near Klatovy, studied violoncello with Franz Joseph Werner in Prague and in 1774 left for Swabia, where he became the first cellist in the court orchestra of Prince von Oettingen-Wallerstein. In the 1880s he was joined by his nephew Antonín, whom Josef adopted. In 1785, Josef, as Kapellmeister, went to Bonn in the services of Maximilian Franz, Elector of Cologne, and took Antonín, an excellent flutist and violinist, with him. At that time, the members of the Hofkapelle included Ludwig van Beethoven and Nikolaus Simrock, who started his own publishing house in Bonn in 1791. This court orchestra came to an end with the occupation of the town of Bonn by the French (1794). After some twists and turns, Antonín settled down in Paris; Josef died prematurely in 1795 at the age of forty-three.

It was Simrock who published the first five opuses by Josef Rejcha, including Concertante pour Deux Violons ou Violon & Violoncelle. In the thematic catalogue of Rejcha’s work, the composition is dated 1774–1777 (with a small question mark), which partly overlap with the time when the composer went on a concert tour of Germany with the violinist Antonín Janič. It is easy to imagine both musicians performing Rejcha’s new composition – from the very beginning, the solo parts of the double concerto were conceived both for two violins and for a violin and a cello. Rejcha’s contemporaries, however, appreciated him not as a composer, but rather as a cello virtuoso. In terms of style, the Double Concerto in D major belongs to the period of musical Classicism, in particular to the circle of the Mannheim School. In each of the three movements, soloists are given the opportunity to dazzle the audience with their virtuosity; there is no drama, but listeners will enjoy the sparkling sound of a mixed chamber orchestra and solo string instruments, and for a long time they will remember some of the themes, such as the main one from the final Rondo.

This composition takes us to Leipzig. The first public performance of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s String Octet in E flat major, Op. 20, was held at the Gewandhaus in 1836, only eleven years after it was composed by the exceptionally gifted son of the banker Mendelssohn when he was just sixteen years old. At the time of the premiere, he was already a conductor of a local renowned orchestra, a successful German composer and pianist, and did not have to be ashamed of his early chamber work, written for his friend, the violinist Eduard Rietz and originally played in a domestic, cultured environment. During the 19^th century, Mendelssohn’s Octet in E flat major was one of the most favorite and frequently performed octets of the time, such as those by Ludwig Spohr, Franz Schubert, Niels Wilhelm Gade and Johan Svendsen. For example, it was heard at the Chamber Music Evening organized by Ludevít Procházka in Prague in 1876, or a few years later in the Czech Chamber Music Society, when two prominent ensembles – Czech Quartet and Ševčík Quartet – joined their efforts to perform this piece.

Young Mendelssohn conceived his octet more “symphonically” than Spohr: the two quartets do not interchange with each other, but all eight instruments work together on equal terms. The composition is in four movements. The longest of them is the first one, Allegro moderato ma con fuoco, which is full of youthful verve, but at the same time Mendelssohn’s work with the melodic line and the sonata form is quite mature. It is followed by the pleasant-sounding Andante, and then by Scherzo, for which the composer drew inspiration from a section of Goethe’s Faust – to be precise, it is a poetic evocation of a mysterious mood, which is elusive and a bit tragic. This quotation demonstrates Mendelssohn’s relationship to German Romanticism and the historical background of the creation and presentation of the work, but it also anticipates Mendelssohn’s interest in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (for today’s generation, it is evocative of Tolkien’s wood-elves…) The final Presto with counterpoint is reminiscent of Handel’s Messiah and ends with a decisive, brilliant finale. The dedication to Eduard Rietz, who died in 1832 at the age of twenty-nine, was also featured in the printed version of 1832, published after Mendelssohn had substantially revised the whole composition. The Octet’s popularity is evidenced by its various arrangements, for example for two pianos, piano four hands or a full orchestra.