Czech Philharmonic • Franz Welser-Möst

The Czech violinist Jan Mráček was born in 1991 in Pilsen and began studying violin at the age of five with Magdaléna Micková. From 2003 he studied with Jiří Fišer, graduating with honors from the Prague Conservatory in 2013, and until recently at the University of Music and the Performing Arts in Vienna under the guidance of the Vienna Symphony concertmaster Jan Pospíchal.

As a teenager he enjoyed his first major successes, winning numerous competitions, participating in the master classes of Maestro Václav Hudeček – the beginning of a long and fruitful association. He won the Czech National Conservatory Competition in 2008, the Hradec International Competition with the Dvořák concerto and the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra in 2009, was the youngest Laureate of the Prague Spring International Festival competition in 2010, and in 2011 he became the youngest soloist in the history of the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 2014 he was awarded first prize at Fritz Kreisler International Violin Competition at the Vienna Konzerthaus. When the victory of Jan Mráček was confirmed, there was thunderous applause from the audience and the jury. The jury president announced, “Jan is a worthy winner. He has fascinated us from the first round. Not only with his technical skills, but also with his charisma on stage.”

Jan Mráček has performed as a soloist with world’s orchestras, including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, Symphony of Florida, Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra, Kuopio Symphony Orchestra, Romanian Radio Symphony, Lappeenranta City Orchestra (Finland) as well as the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Prague Symphony Orchestra (FOK), Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra and almost all Czech regional orchestras.

Jan Mráček had the honor of being invited by Maestro Jiří Bělohlávek to guest lead the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra in their three concert residency at Vienna’s Musikverein, and the European Youth Orchestra under Gianandrea Noseda and Xian Zhang on their 2015 summer tour. He has been a concertmaster of the Czech Philharmonic since 2018.

In 2008 he joined the Lobkowicz Piano Trio, which was awarded first prize and the audience prize at the International Johannes Brahms Competition in Pörtschach, Austria in 2014.

His recording of the Dvořák violin concerto and other works by this Czech composer under James Judd with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra was recently released on the Onyx label and has received excellent reviews.

Jan Mráček plays on a Carlo Fernando Landolfi violin, Milan 1758, generously loaned to him by Mr Peter Biddulph.

For 22 years, Franz Welser-Möst has been cultivating the sound of the Cleveland Orchestra as its music director. That sound is being praised not only by music critics, but also by much of the diverse public, to which many members of the younger generation have been added thanks to Welser-Möst’s programming. Besides performing the traditional concert repertoire, this laureate of the Kennedy Center Gold Medal in the Arts gives world premieres of compositions written on commission and of opera productions. On contract until 2027, he is becoming the music director with the longest tenure in the orchestra’s history. 

Welser-Möst did not have an easy journey towards the perfect professional realisation that the Cleveland Orchestra now offers him. The conductor describes it all in his book Als ich die Stille fand. Ein Plädoyer gegen den Lärm der Welt (From Silence: Finding Calm in a Dissonant World), which appeared in 2020 (and in an English translation in 2021). As an example, already as a student, his chances at a career as a violin virtuoso were ruined by a serious automobile accident, and that turned him definitively in the direction of conducting. He has memories of some difficult times early in his conducting career, especially during his six-year tenure at the helm of the London Philharmonic Orchestra where a rather unhospitable atmosphere prevailed. After that, however, his career moved steadily upwards from the Zurich Opera to Cleveland.

He was briefly intensively engaged with the Vienna Philharmonic, with which he still maintains especially close, productive ties as a guest conductor. He has conducted the orchestra twice at its popular New Year’s Concerts, and he appears with them regularly for concerts at the Musikverein in Vienna and on tours around the world, including commemorative concerts in Sarajevo and Versailles. We also often see him at the Salzburg Festival, which awarded Welser-Möst an important honour (the Festival Brooch with Rubies) in 2020. Besides productions like Rusalka, Der Rosenkavalier, or Fidelio, he has had triumphant success there with a new production of Richard Strauss’s opera Die Liebe der Danae and in 2017 with Lear by Aribert Reimann. He received enthusiastic acclaim in 2018 for Salome by Richard Strauss and a year later for Elektra by the same composer. The latter production celebrated the 100th anniversary of the opera’s premiere and earned Welser-Möst the Austrian Music Theatre Prize.

There are also several CD and DVD recordings from the Salzburg Festival that further enhance Welser-Möst’s already vast, award-winning discography. In addition, his recordings with the Cleveland Orchestra (recent examples include works by Richard Strauss and the American composer George Walker issued on the orchestra’s own label) have been available since 2020 for viewing on the orchestra’s own streaming platform Adella.live.

Prague also got to hear the Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst’s baton in September 2022. The programme consisting solely of works by Richard Strauss thrilled the Dvořák Prague Festival public. The Austrian conductor is making his third appearance at the Rudolfinum with the Czech Philharmonic.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart learned to play the violin from his father Leopold, who was an excellent pedagogue and instrumentalist and a devotee of Tartini and of the Italian art of violin playing in general. As a prodigy, little Mozart travelled around Europe and amazed listeners with the maturity of his technique. In the mid-1770s, he composed five violin concertos (K 207, 211, 216, 218, and 219); the last dates from the end of 1775, although the dating in the score was repeatedly changed afterwards. It is not out of the question that Mozart, then just 19 year old but overflowing with talent as a violin and piano virtuoso and clearly exhibiting ability as a composer, created these concertos knowing that he himself would be their first interpreter. As late as 1777, at a performance in Munich he supposedly felt like “the greatest violinist in Europe” (as he told his father in a letter), but that would soon change.

The Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major (K 219) is particularly famous for the “Turkish” theme of an episode in the final movement, thanks to which the work is sometimes called the “Turkish Concerto”. “Turkish music” was a fashionable stylistic device that was also popular with other composers as well. It is familiar to us, for example, from Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio or from his Piano Sonata in A major (K 331) with its march “alla Turca”. The Janissaries, originally elite troops of the Ottoman military, were accompanied by thunderous bands with lots of percussion, and the rolling and beating of the drums had a considerable psychological impact. By Mozart’s day, musical elements borrowed from the Janissaries tended to be used for evoking a mood of exoticism or even for grotesque colour. Here, Mozart uses unusual expressive resources such as chromatic scales, col legno, and pizzicato to contrast with the lighter sound of the rest of the concerto’s third music, which is mainly in the spirit of a menuet (Rondeau – Tempo di minuetto). The movement has an unusually open-ended conclusion, and the whole concerto actually begins unusually: after the orchestral exposition of the first movement (Allegro aperto), the soloist enters with a heartfelt Adagio that bears comparison with an aria sung by an operatic prima donna. The lovely middle movement (Adagio) in E major is structured as a dialogue between the solo violin and the orchestra. That movement was perhaps too sophisticated for the first audiences and for the Salzburg concertmaster Antonio Brunetti, so Mozart wrote an alternative Adagio (K 261) in 1776.

The number nine is sometimes said to play an important role in symphonic works. Ludwig van Beethoven, Antonín Dvořák, Gustav Mahler, and Anton Bruckner all wrote nine symphonies; if they began writing a tenth, it remained unfinished or just in sketches. Bruckner, however, did not finish even his Ninth Symphony; its fourth movement exists only in fragments (WAB 143) that experts have tried to reconstruct from time to time. Besides that, he also composed other symphonies that are not numbered. The idea that there is something about ninth symphonies that is magical or fatal to their creators is a bit of a conspiracy theory. More important is the fact that at a certain point in a composers’ lives, they feel the need to gather together their most profound thoughts and to express themselves about the most serious subjects (freedom, death, faith…). Logically, they deal with such inspiration at an advanced age in their final works, but the symphony might just as easily be an eighth (Kabeláč) or even a fifteenth (Shostakovich).

Anton Bruckner regarded the symphony as the most important musical form, but he asserted himself only slowly as a composer and especially as a symphonist, and he did not earn wider recognition until the premiere of his Fourth Symphony in the early 1880s. As an organist, however, he was highly acclaimed. He was born to the family of a teacher, and he continued the family tradition: he graduated from a teachers’ institute in Linz, then he taught and played organ in several places. He was probably happiest at the Augustinian monastery Sankt Florian where he got his start and where he was buried years later. He had a chance to become the organist at the cathedral in Olomouc (competition in 1855), but he did not win the position. His fame, however, is shown by the concerts he gave in France and England. He inspected the organ at the newly built Rudolfinum (Prague 1884), and he played at Franz Liszt’s funeral (Bayreuth 1886) as well as for a joyous occasion in the imperial family—the wedding of Archduchess Marie Valerie of Habsburg-Lorraine (Bad Ischl 1890). From the end of the 1860s he taught at the Vienna Conservatoire and from 1875 at the city’s university. He is said to have been unassertive, yet he desired the title of professor. Despite his modesty, he was rather stubborn in adhering tenaciously to his revered role model Richard Wagner despite the feud between Vienna’s Anti-Wagnerites and the proponents of programme music and musical dramas.

Bruckner began composing his Symphony No. 9 in D minor (WAB 109) in 1887 while also revising his eighth, second, and third symphonies. It is no wonder that work on such a huge composition dragged on and was not finished because Bruckner suffered ill health near the end of his life, and he died while composing the last movement (1896). Even so, the three extant movements (I. Feierlich, misterioso – II. Scherzo. Bewegt, lebhaft; Trio. Schnell – III. Adagio. Langsam, feierlich) contain about an hour of music that respects in many ways the legacy of past epochs (Bruckner admired Beethoven’s symphonies and saw himself as Beethoven’s successor), but that also surpasses earlier music in terms of harmony, handling of dissonance, and instrumentation. Bruckner is said to have consecrated the work to the “beloved God” in whom he believed; sensing that he would lot live to finish the final movement, he suggested ending the symphony with his Te Deum (WAB 45). Ferdinand Löwe performed the Ninth Symphony in Vienna in 1903, but with such radical alterations to the score that it could hardly be called a real premiere. It was not until 1932 that Bruckner’s last work was rehearsed by Siegmund von Hausegger with more reverence for the text and was performed in Munich. The existence of a draft of the final fourth movement will always raise questions about what it might have sounded like had Bruckner finished it. In view of Bruckner’s custom—almost a mania—of improving, revising, and reworking his compositions, I cannot help but wonder timidly what he still would have changed in his “Ninth” if he had been given the chance.