Czech Philharmonic • Johan Dalene

The principal artistic legacy of Finland’s national composer Jean Sibelius consists of his symphonic works. He wrote only one concerto for solo instrument and orchestra, yet it has become one of his most frequently performed works and one of the most difficult and most popular concertos in the entire violin literature.

The Violin Concerto in D minor did not have an easy path to triumph in the world’s concert halls. Sibelius originally dedicated it to the renowned violinist Willy Burmester, who was also supposed to have given the work’s world premiere in Berlin. Shortly beforehand, however, Sibelius found himself in financial difficulty, as he did many times during his lifetime, and plans for the concerto’s premiere had to be re-evaluated. The premiere finally took place in early 1904 in Helsinki with Sibelius himself conducting the local orchestra, and the violin part was entrusted to Viktor Nováček, a rather obscure violinist of Czech origin. The composer had high hopes for the concerto’s premiere, but circumstances did not allow their fulfilment. Nováček did not have enough time to learn the work, nor was his ability up to the demands of Sibelius’s concerto. Disappointed by negative reviews, the composer withdrew the work and went to work on revising it. The second performance of the concerto was at Berlin’s Singakademie, but Sibelius’s publisher had the decisive word in choosing the soloist and conductor. For this reason, Burmester once again was not the performer of the solo part, which was instead played by Karel Halíř, the concertmaster of the Berlin Court Orchestra, and Richard Strauss conducted the performance. Although Halíř also was not a virtuoso on par with Burmester, the second version of the concerto got positive reviews from the Berlin critics. The concerto’s acceptance into the repertoire was slowed by the extraordinary technical difficulty of the solo part. It did not gain its present popularity until after the Second World War, thanks in particular to American violinists including the legendary Jascha Heifetz, who made the first recording of the concerto in 1935.

Sibelius had long desired to write a violin concerto. The choice of instrument was no coincidence; the composer devoted himself intensively to playing the violin. Before the current season began, this evening’s soloist Johan Delane said, “From the work’s technical difficulty, one recognises immediately that Sibelius was a violinist. The concerto exploits all of the instrument’s capabilities, and it is able to describe the natural surroundings of Scandinavia convincingly.” While, for example, the German composers of the early 20th century were taking inspiration from modernism and were exploring the new frontiers of tonality, the character of Sibelius’s music remained very romantic, but one cannot say that his musical language was stuck in the past. Sibelius’s music was also influenced by the French Impressionists, and he is sometimes categorised among those composers. His Violin Concerto literally overflows with melodic motifs that also embody a wide range of moods from lyricism to melancholy and finally the dancelike frolicking of the third movement. The violin part is exceptionally virtuosic in many ways, and the soloist must demonstrate first-class technical skill and expressive feeling. The violin fundamentally carries the melodic material, and the orchestral accompaniment never completely overwhelms the soloist. Here, too, Sibelius undeniably benefits from his experience as a symphonist who was able to make sensitive use of all of the colouristic possibilities of the individual groups of instruments.

Sibelius came from a Swedish-speaking family, and he did not begin to learn to speak Finnish until he was 11 years old. Despite this, he was a patriot all his life and loved Finland’s natural beauty. His compositions were often inspired by nature and by Finnish mythology. Sibelius is regarded as his country’s national composer and as one of the symbols of Finnish identity and of the country’s struggle for independence from Russia. That struggle came to a head with the revolution of 1917, when Sibelius’s homeland won its independence.

One of Semyon Bychkov’s artistic goals with the Czech Philharmonic is to perform music by contemporary composers, and not just compositions that have already been written and performed elsewhere. The Czech Philharmonic has approached nine Czech and five foreign composers, who have written or are writing new works for the orchestra. One of them is the 62-year-old composer Detlev Glanert. A native of Hamburg, Germany, he and the chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic share not only a close personal friendship, but also a similar artistic outlook. Bychkov has repeatedly conducted Glanert’s works all around Europe, and he regards him as one of today’s most interesting composers: “I greatly admire Detlev’s music. He’s an outstanding opera composer with a feeling for the text and a sense of drama and philosophy. The first time I heard his Requiem for Hieronymus Bosch, I was brought to tears in several places by how beautiful the music is. That doesn’t happen to me often with contemporary music.”

In recent years, the Czech Philharmonic was supposed to have given three performances of Glanert’s music. In January 2019 there was a performance of the brief orchestral composition Weites Land based on motifs from Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. Then the Czech premiere of the monumental Requiem for Hieronymus Bosch was planned for March 2020. Composed for the 500th anniversary of the great Dutch painter’s death, it was commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of what would have been an extraordinary musical event. A few years later, Glanert’s Prague Symphony met with the same fate, when the Czech Philharmonic was supposed to have become the first orchestra in the world to perform it. While the performance of the symphony has been rescheduled successfully, and the work is finally being given its world premiere in Prague, the artistically and logistically more demanding Requiem, which requires not only a symphony orchestra, but also a quartet of vocal soloists, a narrator, and two choirs, is still awaiting its opportunity.

Detlev Glanert is acclaimed above all as a composer of works for voice and orchestra, and he has 14 operas to his credit. Even in his Prague Symphony, inspired by the Czech capital city and by Franz Kafka, he has not avoided working with a text and the human voice. The composer has written his own libretto using excerpts from Kafka’s lesser-known poetry, which he has entrusted to a pair of singers. Glanert’s teacher was the German opera composer Hanz Werner Henze, but in his music we also observe inspiration from Brahms, Mahler, Strauss, and even Maurice Ravel. Glanert sees the composers of the Second Viennese School as his musical forefathers. At the same time, however, he says that he gives precedence to melodies over tone rows, and he is even unafraid to speak of some kind of musical beauty, however subjectively it may be perceived. Glanert also regards making a connection with the listener as especially important: “A work has to tell you something about what is going on in real people’s lives. It has to tell you something about the world you live in and something about you, personally. This principle applies in opera just like in orchestral music. And if it isn’t there, the work is dead.”

Glanert patterned his latest symphony after Prague itself and after Franz Kafka’s descriptions of the city in his works. “Prague never lets go. Neither of you, nor of me. This little mother has claws”, wrote Kafka to his schoolmate Oskar Pollak. Glanert took inspiration from Kafka’s less familiar poetic texts, letters, and diary entries, and using fragments from them he put together his own libretto. He conceived the symphony as a sequence of twelve songs linked directly together, thereby creating a continuous flow of about 45 minutes of music. For Glanert as an experienced opera composer, the human voice is one of the key media for dramatic communication, and he is also capable of using every nuance of vocal colour to express the whole range of moods and emotions. For his Prague Symphony, he has used lower-pitched voices, mezzo-soprano and bass-baritone. That combination seems to give the best reflection of the sometimes enchanting and sometimes dark mood of Kafkaesque, mystical Prague.