Czech Philharmonic • Josef Špaček

“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.  

Since the 2018/2019 season, Tomáš Netopil has been the Principal Guest Conductor of the Czech Philharmonic, with which he regularly prepares concert programmes at the Rudolfinum and on tours. The 2022/2023 season was his tenth and final as General Music Director of the Aalto Theater and Philharmonic in Essen, Germany. From the 2025/2026 season, he will take up the post of chief conductor of the Prague Symphony Orchestra. 

In 2018, Tomáš Netopil created the International Summer Music Academy in Kroměříž, offering students exceptional artistic instruction and the chance to meet and work with major international musicians. In the summer of 2021, in association with the Dvořákova Praha Festival, the Academy established the Dvořák Prague Youth Philharmonic with musicians from conservatories and music academies, coached by principal players of the Czech Philharmonic.

As evidenced by his engagement in Essen, Tomáš Netopil is a sought-after opera conductor. From 2008 to 2012, he was the music director of the Opera of the National Theatre in Prague. Operatic highlights beyond Essen include the Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden (La clemenza di Tito, Rusalka, The Cunning Little Vixen, La Juive, The Bartered Bride, and Busoni’s Doktor Faust), the Vienna Staatsoper (his most recent successes include Idomeneo, Der Freischütz, and a new production of Leonore), and the Netherlands Opera (Jenůfa). His concert highlights of recent seasons have included the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich as well as engagements with the Orchestre de Paris, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Orchestra Sinfonica della Rai, the Orchestre National de Montpellier, and Concentus Musicus Wien.

Tomáš Netopil’s discography for Supraphon includes Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass (the first-ever recording of the original 1927 version), Dvořák’s complete cello works, Martinů’s Ariane and Double Concerto, and Smetana’s Má vlast with the Prague Symphony Orchestra. During his tenure in Essen, he has recorded Suk’s Asrael and Mahler’s Symphonies Nos. 6 and 9.

He studied violin and conducting in his native Czech Republic and at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm under the guidance of Professor Jorma Panula. In 2002 he won the inaugural Sir Georg Solti Conductors Competition at the Alte Oper Frankfurt. In his spare time, he likes to fly small planes.

Leoš Janáček’s operas made him world famous, and the genre was always one of the cornerstones of his oeuvre. He finished writing The Makropulos Affair (Věc Makropulos), the penultimate of his nine stage works, in 1925 at 71 years of age, but the music does not at all resemble the work of a tired, old man. To the contrary, Janáček was bursting with energy during the last period of his life. In 1917 while staying at the spa in Luhačovice, he met Kamila Stösslová, a woman nearly 40 years younger than him, and she became his source of inspiration and muse. Their relationship, which lasted until the end of the composer’s life, was full of tender emotion, but those feelings were much more intense on Janáček’s part. Kamila was flattered by the attentions of the famous composer, but she had no special admiration for his music and seemed to be unaware of the profound influence she was having on Janáček. Nonetheless, their friendship was in the background of one of the most fruitful periods of Janáček’s career, and Kamila became the model for several operatic heroines including Elina Makropulos. 

Čapek’s play about an immortal singer utterly captivated Janáček, who had already dealt with the theme of life’s eternal cycle in his previous opera The Cunning Little Vixen (Příhody lišky Bystroušky). After initial hesitation, Karel Čapek finally gave Janáček permission to adapt the play into an opera, and he even gave the composer a free hand to make cuts and other changes to the action. Janáček turned what had originally been a comic play based on dialogues into a drama about immortality, the desire for love, and the search for the meaning of life, at the end of which the chief heroine dies.

Orchestral suites from operas and ballets were an especially popular genre during the 19th century. The suites could serve as promotion for the works from which they were drawn while bringing popular music to the concert stage in a more condensed form. In his operas, Janáček strove to create compact music dramas with inseparable textual and musical elements. Věc Makropulos is his supreme achievement in this respect. The six-minute prelude to Act I is the only purely instrumental passage, and unlike The Cunning Little Vixen or Káťa Kabanová, the opera lacks orchestral interludes entirely. For this reason, putting together a suite from Věc Makropulos requires significant compositional input. Rather than compiling self-contained instrumental numbers, one must artfully combine shorter passages and motifs, merging them into a whole that is musically meaningful despite the loss of the vocal component. The Czech composer Tomáš Ille created the most recent arrangement at the suggestion of the conductor Tomáš Netopil and finished it not long before its premiere in November 2022. 

Bohuslavu Martinů was not fated to spend much time living in his homeland although he loved his country deeply all his life, and visions of a return home are woven into many of his works. He left his native country for Paris in 1923 seeking artistic development in what was one of the world’s great musical centres at the time. Martinů had always been impressed with the arts in France, and while living there he absorbed the influences from Impressionism, Neoclassicism, the composers of the Parisian group Les six, and Igor Stravinsky. The Nazi occupation of France in 1941 drove Martinů even farther from his native land. He and his wife Charlotte emigrated to the USA. At this time, he was writing not only major works like Sixth Symphony or The Frescos of Piero della Francesca, but also many smaller pieces, often lyrical in character, which Martinů conceived as a kind of greeting to his homeland mainly by using motifs from Czech folk music. 

One such work is the Rhapsody-Concerto for viola and orchestra (1952), commissioned by the conductor George Szell and the Ukrainian violinist and violist Jascha Veissi. In his final style period, unlike the composers of the post-war avant-garde, Martinů subjected his musical language to an overall simplification. This transformation is clearly apparent in the Rhapsody-Concerto with its accessible harmonies, striking melodic writing, and masterful instrumentation. The work contains symphonic passage of sonic richness, but at the same time the composer sensitively lets the coloristic nuances of the individual instrumental sections come through, and of course above all the sentimental, sweet tone of the viola. Bohuslav Martinů had an extraordinarily well-developed sense of musical form, and in the last years of his life, this led him to turn with increasing frequency to the genres of fantasias and rhapsodies. Those allowed him much greater room for meditative, lyrical-sounding compositions reflecting his momentary emotional state. Although the internal structure of the Rhapsody-Concerto exhibits traits of the classical three-movement concerto, Martinů deliberately did not title his two-movement composition for solo viola a viola concerto. The tempo indications are somewhat symbolic; slow, lyrical and fast, virtuosic passages recur in both movements. An alternation of dramatic episodes also emerges both in the solo part and in the orchestra, but each of the two movements is framed by calm passages, and the whole work concludes with the sustaining of a quiet, conciliatory F major chord, dominated to the very end by the viola’s seductive tone.

Inspiration from folk music is also characteristic of the works of Vítězslav Novák, who spent part of his youth in Jindřichův Hradec, to which he and his family moved from his birthplace Kamenice nad Lipou, and where he also completed his grammar school studies. This was also the time of Novák’s first attempts at composing, consisting mostly of songs and little piano pieces. As a beginner, he became thoroughly familiar with the music of all of the great Romantic-era composers including Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Berlioz, but the greatest influence on him was the music of Johannes Brahms and especially of Antonín Dvořák, under whose tutelage Novák graduated from the Prague Conservatoire in 1893. 

Vítězslav Novák composed in a wide range of genres including many songs and piano pieces, but he also wrote nearly 30 choruses that often react to current social themes. In the field of orchestral music, he devoted himself mainly to smaller forms, symphonic poems, suites, and overtures, but he also wrote two large-scale symphonies combining vocal and instrumental forces. Novák’s compositional style underwent development comparable to that of his contemporary Richard Strauss. He was influenced by Impression, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau, and he also experimented with extended tonality, but he never left tonality entirely behind. Overall, Novák’s music retained the character of Late Romanticism.

Like Strauss, Vítězslav Novák found inspiration in nature. Slovakia’s Tatra Mountains enchanted him, and at the age of 26 he made his first visit to Velké Karlovice in Moravian Wallachia. He quickly fell in love with the distinctive region, which awakened his interest in folklore motifs. This is also reflected in his Moravian-Slovak Suite (1903). Novák conceived the work as a series of scenes illustrating a day of festive celebration in the Moravian countryside. The five-movement cycle is inspired by folk singing. The first movement, In the Church, quotes a Protestant hymn, and in the movement The Country Musicians, the composer takes inspiration from the verbuňk, a “recruiting dance” from Horňácko (a region of Upper Moravian Slovakia). In his Moravian-Slovak Suite, Novák employs a small orchestra including harp and organ. Those two instruments combine with the lyrical sound of the strings and the tenderness of the woodwinds to create the extraordinarily poetic, picturesque atmosphere of what is one of Novák’s most popular compositions.