Czech Philharmonic • Premiere Evening

For Czech Philharmonic fans, the American conductor Keith Lockhart probably comes to mind in connection with the traditional June open-air concerts on Hradčany Square – at the end of last season, Lockhart took the baton before the leading Czech orchestra on that occasion for the second time. He is the music director of the Boston Pops Orchestra and the artistic director of the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina, but Czech audiences may associate him with four popular concerts given around the Czech Republic when in 2016 the Czech Philharmonic joined with him in presenting a programme titled The Best of Broadway, the very first concert of melodies from musicals that the Rudolfinum-based orchestra ever played.

Keith Lockhart was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, and he began his music education with piano lessons at age seven. A graduate of Furman University majoring in both German and piano, he furthered his studies at Carnegie Mellon University, where his focus finally turned to conducting. He has now been the conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra for nearly 30 years, since 1995. With that orchestra, he has given nearly 2,000 performances and has gone on 45 American tours visiting 150 cities. There were also four tours abroad. His full impact on America’s cultural life can also be seen in the 80 television broadcasts on which he has appeared, including performances at such major sporting events such as the American football championship (Super Bowl) and the NBA basketball finals. Each year on Independence Day (the Fourth of July), the orchestra attracts an audience of over half a million (along with millions more watching the live TV broadcast) for the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular. Not all of his American conducting legacy is connected with the Boston Pops Orchestra. For 11 years he was the music director of the Utah Symphony Orchestra, where his most visible performance was certainly at the opening of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Although most of Lockhart’s performing has been in North America (where one might say he has conducted nearly every orchestra), his activities in Europe have been by no means negligible. He has stood at the helm of such orchestras as the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, and from 2010 to 2018 he served as the principal guest conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra, with which he took part in annual festival appearances at The Proms and in celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the orchestra’s founding. Also in 2012, the ensemble performed at a gala concert for Britain’s late Queen Elizabeth II.

The coloratura soprano Vanda Šípová graduated from the Prague Conservatory, where her voice teacher was the national artist Václav Zítek. Then she studied with the Russian baritone Vladimir Chernov and her current voice advisor is the Czech-Bulgarian opera singer Christina Vasileva. She has also attended a number of singing courses, among others with Josef Protschka, Tom Krause, Nancy Hanninger and Gabriela Beňačková. She has garnered accolades at international competitions, including the Vissi d’Arte in Prague (second prize), the Concours musical international de Montréal (first prize), the Antonín Dvořák International Vocal Competition in Karlovy Vary (the Slovak National Theatre Prize), and won other awards.

While still a student, she collaborated with the Prague State Opera and performed with the Karlovy Vary Symphony Orchestra. She sang Madame Giry in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera and performed at the J. K. Tyl Theater in Pilsen, the F. X. Šalda in Liberec and the National Theater in Brno. At the National Theater in Prague she played Singer Kristýna in the world premiere of Petr Kofroň’s The Phantom, or The Bloody Opera; the three-role Geisha-Spectator-Voice in Martin Smolka’s opera Nagano; the Muse in Miloš Orson Štědroň’s opera Don Hrabal; Yvonne, a hotel chambermaid, in Ernst Krenek’s opera Jonny spielt auf; and the leading lady, Helga, in Ivan Acher’s opera Sternenhoch. Her current repertoire also includes the Queen of the Night (Die Zauberflöte), Gilda (Rigoletto), Ophélie (Hamlet), Musetta (La Bohème), Glauce (Medea) and other roles.

She likes to participate in modern projects in which various theater genres are intertwined – for example, she sang at the opening and closing ceremony of the 2017 International Karlovy Vary Film Festival or in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass in the Czech production of Vojtěch Dyk. She has also performed in several dramatic performances – in the Studio of Heroes in Prague alongside Karel Dobrý in Day of the Oprichnik or at the National Theater in Brno alongside Vladimír Javorský in The Duchess and the Cook, and as a guest in the international theater company Krepsko. She also gives concerts where she performs works such as those by Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss and Erich Korngold.

The composer Adrián Demoč entitled his adagio for orchestra Neha [Tenderness], and the title seems to be self-explanatory as regards its musical and emotional content. The quiet and freely flowing chords almost caress each other and softly radiate into space. However, although the title of the composition indicates how it should be interpreted, Demoč’s idea was primarily musical. Neha is a calm piece which does not feel compelled to show the “infinite” possibilities of orchestration. The composer’s instructions in the score are, for example, “as a whole”, “smoothly”, “tenderly” or “without vibrato”. However, this does not mean that the result is static – there are less perceptible vibrations and motions under the surface. Each individual tone should sound gently, softly and delicately.

Percussion instruments include Thai gongs that have a long, hazy sound with a specific pitch. In combination with the wind instruments it is reminiscent of the soft sound of bells. At the same time, it also acts as a bonding element – similarly to a piano pedal. Equally important in the overall harmony is the use of wind instruments with the so-called “hotel dampers”, which are mainly used for practicing. Sound registers also require great care. The consonances of Neha are known, but their sound is different, perhaps nostalgic. Using the words of the Slovak writer Dominik Tatarka, Adrián Demoč has dedicated his composition to “my Czech friends whom I love”.

Adrián Demoč is a Slovak composer living in Spain. He studied composition privately with Igor Dibák, and subsequently at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno under František Emmert and Martin Smolka, at the National University of Music in Bucharest under Doina Rotaru and at the Lithuanian Academy of Performing Arts under Osvaldas Balakauskas. In 2016 he won the Young Composers Prize awarded by the Plural Ensemble of Madrid.

Orpingalikʼs Songs for soprano and orchestra were composed by Jana Vöröšová based on the Inuit poetry, as first published in the translations of Ladislav Novák in 1965. By their atmosphere, these short poems evoke a world different from ours. They suit the composer not only by their specific imagery, but also the character of magic invocations and their brevity. A comprehensive textual material would attract too much attention, while the concise poetic statements can gather layers of musical meanings like a snowball.

“The most important thing for me was the feeling that the poems evoked in me, because I have never been to Greenland,” says Vöröšová about the Inuit texts. “A lot of Inuit poetry consists of invocations. It is a different world, but at the same time conditioned by what one encounters. When you are in the mountains for a long time, you get something like a visual or color deprivation. And when you return to the civilization, you realize that red is red because you have not seen it for a long time. I have tried to conceive of each movement of Orpingalikʼs Songs in a different way in order to achieve dissimilar images. I have chosen the texts accordingly, and each part is different in terms of composition. The result is audio-visual images based on simple textual inspiration.”

Jana Vöröšová is a Czech composer. She studied composition at the Prague Conservatory in the class of Bohuslav Řehoř and at the Music Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague in the class of Václav Riedlbauch. She also studied at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels and completed a three-month internship in Paris. Her compositions have been heard at the Contempuls, Wien Modern and Prague Spring festivals.

“I built a cottage for Susan and myself, and made a gateway in the form of a Gothic arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw-bones,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in his tale The Village Uncle. Arches of whale jaw-bones in an imaginary prolongation also intersect in Matouš Hejl’s Crossings. The core of the composition is formed by the mirroring, crossing and intersection of vocal lines, leading the orchestra to a large, albeit soft sound composed of a number of individually led voices.

At first glance, the mirroring is already evident in the orchestra’s arrangement. The composer prescribes placing groups of the first and second violins opposite each other. Four trumpeters are to be placed in pairs on opposite sides of the orchestra. Two of the five percussionists should be placed in the same way. The mutually reflecting lines, however, go mainly through the structure of the composition itself.

Crossings requires a full symphony orchestra, but it seldom perceives the groups of instruments as a whole. Wind instruments, usually with four players for each instrument, only rarely play in unison; in some passages, as many as 12 violins or 8 double basses each play their individual parts. Crossings does not create a large dynamic arc, working to a large extent with pianissimo, and its contrasts are encoded primarily in horizontal and vertical motion. The instruments touch extreme depths: the contrabassoon goes as low as subcontra Bb; this descend is fictitiously joined by trombones because this deepest possible orchestral tone is out of their range.

Matouš Hejl (born 1989) is a Czech composer. He studied at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and the Berklee College of Music in Boston. In 2018 he won a contemporary music award, A Little Lower C4; and in 2016, the Karel Krautgartner Prize for the best composition for a jazz orchestra.

The final suite from the opera The Cunning Little Vixen will remind us of this most optimistic stage work by Leoš Janáček. It is also a commemoration of this extraordinary Czech modernist who reached the very limit of the possibilities of his time in his search for his own musical language. Janáček’s oeuvre was not fully appreciated until the late 1970s and early 1980s, while over the past 30 years it has become a permanent part of the opera and concert repertoire around the world.