Josef Špaček and the Czech Student Philharmonic

Concert on 27th September is cancelled.

The program is based on a musical part but also on a spoken word that will be given in Czech language only. The program will not be supplied with English subtitles.

I would like to write a violin concerto for you this winter. The beginning in E minor keeps running through my head, and it gives me no peace! (…) Don’t laugh at me too much… [As far as the concerto is concerned…] I’m still groping… (F. Mendelssohn Bartholdy in a letter to Ferdinand David, his friend and the first performer of his Violin Concerto)

The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest and most uncompromising is Beethoven’s. Brahms’s competes with Beethoven’s in terms of seriousness. Max Bruch has written the most magical violin concerto. But the most deeply felt, the real treasure of the heart, is Mendelssohn’s concerto. (Joseph Joachim, the great German violinist and one of the first performers of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto)

In the history of the arts, it would be hard to find such an example of deep unity of everything from the past with such penetrating vision of the future as in the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He was one of the three great composers of Viennese Classicism, historically speaking. But he will always remain a classic in a deeper sense – how he managed to take the enormity of his musical invention and his boundless ocean of ideas and imagination and subject them to discipline and formal clarity.He is joyful, sad, serious, silly, monumental, playful, brilliantly virtuosic, and disciplined with simplicity, and we could go on and on without saying everything because words cannot describe music. One must listen to it; one must maintain a simple, deeply comprehending heart with an open, unprejudiced mind. Then we can understand him. If we can do this even a little bit, we will love him. (…) Mozart wrote his first symphony when he was 8 years old. By the age of 26 he had already written a few dozen symphonies. The mayor of his native Salzburg, Sigmund Haffner, was being elevated to the nobility at the time. He held an appropriately lavish celebration and commissioned Mozart to compose a symphony for him. Mozart wrote it in a few days… The symphony is a truly important work in Mozart’s oeuvre, because in it he achieved an unprecedented balance of all available resources. The writing is wonderful and the form magnificent; there is nobility and pathos, and the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic ideas are enchanting. Order and imagination are bonded into a single whole. (Ivan Medek, music journalist)