Czech Philharmonic • Rudolf Buchbinder

Rudolf Buchbinder is one of the legendary artists of our time. His piano playing is an unparalleled fusion of the authority of a career spanning more than 60 years with spirit and spontaneity. His renditions are celebrated worldwide for their intellectual depth and musical freedom.

Particularly his renditions of Ludwig van Beethovenʼs works are considered to be exemplary. He has performed the 32 piano sonatas 60 times in cycles all over the world and developed the story of their interpretation over decades. He was the first pianist to play all Beethoven sonatas at the Salzburg Festival during a summer festival. A live recording is available on DVD.

On the occasion of Ludwig van Beethovenʼs 250^th birthday in the 2019/2020 concert season, for the first time in its 150-year history, the Vienna Musikverein is giving a single pianist, Rudolf Buchbinder, the honor of performing all five piano concertos by Ludwig van Beethoven in a specially edited cycle. Buchbinderʼs partners in this unprecedented constellation are the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Music Director Andris Nelsons, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Riccardo Muti and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden under their chief conductors Mariss Jansons, Valery Gergiev and Christian Thielemann.

Together with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Mariss Jansons, Rudolf Buchbinder returned to the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Philharmonie Luxembourg and the Carnegie Hall New York as part of a tour.

A première is the focus of the Beethoven Year 2020. Based on Beethovenʼs Diabelli Variations Op. 120, Rudolf Buchbinder initiated a new cycle of variations on the same waltz by Anton Diabelli, which also forms the basis of Beethovenʼs epochal masterpiece. With Lera Auerbach, Brett Dean, Toshio Hosokawa, Christian Jost, Brad Lubman, Philippe Manoury, Krzysztof Penderecki, Max Richter, Rodion Shchedrin, Johannes Maria Staud, Tan Dun and Jörg Widmann, it was possible to win twelve leading contemporary composers of different generations and backgrounds. The New Diabelli Variations were commissioned by a variety of concert promoters worldwide and with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

The world première recording of the New Diabelli Variations marks the beginning of Rudolf Buchbinderʼs exclusive partnership with Deutsche Grammophon. At the same time he also presents a new recording of Beethovenʼs Diabelli Variations, which he last recorded in 1976.

Rudolf Buchbinder is an honorary member of the Vienna Philharmonic, the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. He is the first soloist to be awarded the Golden Badge of Honor by the Staatskapelle Dresden.

Buchbinder attaches great importance to source research. His private music collection comprises 39 complete editions of Ludwig van Beethovenʼs piano sonatas as well as an extensive archive of first prints, original editions and copies of the piano scores of both piano concertos by Johannes Brahms.

He has been the artistic director of the Grafenegg Festival since its foundation in 2007. Today, Grafenegg is one of the most influential orchestral festivals in Europe.

Two books by Rudolf Buchbinder have been published so far, his autobiography Da Capo and Mein Beethoven – Leben mit dem Meister. Numerous award-winning recordings on CD and DVD document his career.

For concert dates and further information please visit the homepage www.buchbinder.net

In recognition of the 2024 Year of Czech Music – a major celebration of Czech music celebrated across the Czech Republic every 10 years since 1924 – Chief Conductor and Music Director Semyon Bychkov has put the music of Antonín Dvořák at the centre of his programmes with the Czech Philharmonic throughout the 2023–2024 season. In addition to conducting three programmes devoted to Dvořák in Prague, Bychkov and the Orchestra will tour the Dvořák programmes to South Korea, Japan, Spain, Austria, Germany, Belgium and the United States, as well as recording the last three symphonies for Pentatone. 

Semyon Bychkovʼs tenure at the Czech Philharmonic began in 2018 with concerts in Prague, London, New York, and Washington commemorating the 100th anniversary of Czechoslovak independence. Following the culmination of The Tchaikovsky Project, Bychkov and the Orchestra began their focus on Mahler. The first discs in a new Mahler cycle were released by Pentatone in 2022, with Symphony No. 5 chosen by The Sunday Times as its Best Classical Album.

Bychkovʼs repertoire spans four centuries. His highly anticipated performances are a unique combination of innate musicality and rigorous Russian pedagogy. In addition to guest engagements with the world’s major orchestras and opera houses, Bychkov holds honorary titles with the BBC Symphony Orchestra – with whom he appears annually at the BBC Proms – and the Royal Academy of Music, who recently awarded him an Honorary Doctorate. Bychkov was named “Conductor of the Year” by the International Opera Awards in 2015 and, by Musical America in 2022.

Bychkov began recording in 1986 and released discs with the Berlin Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio, Royal Concertgebouw, Philharmonia Orchestra and London Philharmonic for Philips. Subsequently a series of benchmark recordings with WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne featured Brahms, Mahler, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Strauss, Verdi, Glanert and Höller. Bychkov’s 1993 recording of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin with the Orchestre de Paris continues to win awards, most recently the Gramophone Collection 2021; Wagner’s Lohengrin was BBC Music Magazine’s Record of the Year (2010); and Schmidt’s Symphony No. 2 with the Vienna Philharmonic was BBC Music Magazine’s Record of the Month (2018).

In common with the Czech Philharmonic, Bychkov has one foot firmly in the culture of the East and the other in the West. Born in St Petersburg in 1952, he studied at the Leningrad Conservatory with the legendary Ilya Musin. Denied his prize of conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic, Bychkov emigrated to the United States in 1975 and, has lived in Europe since the mid-1980’s. In 1989, the same year he was named Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, Bychkov returned to the former Soviet Union as the St Petersburg Philharmonic’s Principal Guest Conductor. He was appointed Chief Conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra (1997) and Chief Conductor of Dresden Semperoper (1998).

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the summer of 1899 until April 1901, Mahler composed his Symphony No. 4, the most classical of his monumental symphonies. The composition has roots that reach back even further in time, however. During the frigid February of 1892, Mahler composed the song Der Himmel hängt voll Geigen for voice and piano to a text from the poetry collection The Youth’s Magic Horn, which contains more than seven hundred texts of old German folksongs and popular songs. The collection had been published nearly a century earlier in 1806–1808 by the young poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Mahler discovered it by chance in 1887 while visiting the grandson of the composer Carl Maria von Weber, and he drew on it for subject matter for his compositions for another fourteen years. A month after composing the song, in March 1892 Mahler finished orchestrating it with the characteristic use of harp and sleigh bells, and he gave it his own title, Das himmlishe Leben (Heavenly Life). He took a special liking for the song, and he often included it on concert programmes of his music. It was originally to have been the conclusion of this Third Symphony, but ultimately that colossal work would have “just” six movements, and Heavenly Life instead became the finale, intellectual focus, and climax of the Fourth Symphony.

It might seem that the Fourth Symphony is just a continuation and completion of the Third, but already in the first movement we hear unmistakeable fanfares that foreshadow Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which was yet to come. In Mahler’s music, everything is closely tied together.The second movement, although dancelike, makes an oppressive impression – it is, after all, also a dance of death played on the fiddle by the skeleton Freund Hein! The solo violin is to be tuned a step higher to give it a harsher, shriller tone, making the soloist sound like a street musician instead of a concertmaster of a symphony orchestra. Mahler is said to have taken inspiration from Arnold Böcklin’s 1872 painting titled Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle. (In 1894, the same painting also inspired Jaroslav Vrchlický’s poem, in which a painter is creating a self-portrait but constantly feels something disturbing behind his back. When he turns around, he sees Death with a fiddle.)The third movement is the longest. It is a magnificent series of variations inspired by the vision of a tombstone on which there is a carved image of the departed in eternal sleep. The music leads us to a vision of heaven’s gates.

Beyond the gates we are welcomed by a “child’s” voice – a soprano – in heaven, where peace reigns supreme, where there is no bustle of the secular world, where everyone can rejoice and dance. And with this image of childlike naivety, Mahler completes his journey from the complex to the simple, from experience to innocence, and from earthly life to heavenly bliss.

In the twenty-first century, Mahler’s music and its message are still attractive to listeners. The form, content, and intellectual and emotional power of the music make it surprisingly relevant to our post-modern epoch.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) zanechal v oboru instrumentálních koncertů pět děl určených klavíru, jeden Houslový koncert a Trojkoncert pro klavír, housle a violoncello.  Rozličné skici a náčrtky však dokládají, že se tímto druhem zabýval dlouhá léta – posledním svědectvím je plánovaný, avšak opuštěný šestý klavírní koncert z roku 1815. Klavír byl pro Beethovena zásadním nástrojem. Sám byl ceněným klavíristou, podle stupňující se náročnosti jeho děl, klavíru určených, lze usuzovat i na rozvoj vlastní technické vyspělosti jako interpreta. Beethoven vyšel z Mozartova odkazu a dále jej rozvinul, a to především ve třech aspektech: ve způsobu prezentace sólového partu, ve snaze po myšlenkové jednotě uvnitř jednotlivých vět, usiloval také o jejich vzájemný vztah, a rozšířil užití harmonických prostředků.

V Koncertu pro klavír a orchestr č. 5 Es dur například otevírá větu třikrát opakovaný, improvizačně působící úsek – akord Es dur v orchestru a rapsodická pasáž klavíru. Tento úvod utvrzuje hlavní tóninu, teprve poté nastupuje vlastní expozice, která prochází řadou harmonických modulací. Celá věta osciluje mezi durovým a mollovým tónorodem, střídání nálad je podporováno kontrastem tematického materiálu. Tehdejší posluchač, uvyklý konvenčním postupům, se musel ve zdánlivě nelogických harmonických spojích a nezávisle působících úsecích nejprve zorientovat. Druhá věta svou meditativní lyrikou už předjímá romantické období. Příkladem myšlenkového spojení mezi větami je vynoření tematického materiálu finální věty v závěru druhé věty. Závěrečná věta je připojena attacca, formálně se jedná o sonátové rondo, v jehož provedení opět Beethoven uplatnil originální harmonické řešení. Věta končí rozsáhlou kodou. Skladatel nenechává prostor pro obvyklé improvizované kadence, všechny pasáže jsou detailně vypsány. Tato důslednost se vykládá dvojím způsobem: dílo nebylo určeno pouze profesionálním klavíristům, nýbrž také pokročilým amatérům, k čemuž poukazují v partituře i alternativní, technicky méně náročná místa. Je to však také zároveň doklad uzavřenosti díla, které se nemělo stát předmětem interpretační libovůle.

Skladbabyla komponována roku 1809, dokončena v únoru 1810 a skladatel ji věnoval svému mecenáši a žáku, arcivévodovi Rudolfovi, příštímu arcibiskupu v Olomouci. Ještě téhož roku koncert vyšel tiskem v Londýně; přízvisko Emperor (Císařský) dodal dílu anglický vydavatel, snad s ohledem na majestátní charakter díla, ale i s poukazem na nositele dedikace, habsburského arcivévodu. Roku 1811 vydalo partituru také nakladatelství Breitkopf & Härtel v Lipsku, kde se v Gewandhausu uskutečnila 28. listopadu 1811 světová premiéra; sólistou byl Johann Christian Friedrich Schneider, později dvorní kapelník vévodství Anhalt-Dessau. Klavíristou vídeňské premiéry následujícího roku, 11. února 1812, byl Beethovenův žák Carl Czerny. Uskutečnila se současně s otevřením výtvarné výstavy, na níž byla prezentována mimo jiné díla Raffaelova. Menší ohlas Beethovenovy novinky ve Vídni než v Lipsku se vysvětluje právě tímto společenským rámcem – svým způsobem šlo o hudební doprovod vernisáže. Ve velice krátké době se však z celé pětice Beethovenových klavírních koncertů stal Koncert Es dur nejoblíbenějším.