Czech Philharmonic • Velvet Revolution Concerts

Now at the beginning of a new 5-year contract as Chief Conductor and Music Director of the Czech Philharmonic, Semyon Bychkov’s relationship with the Orchestra has become noticeably deeper with extraordinary performances of the great Czech masters running in parallel with a much-acclaimed Mahler cycle recorded for Pentatone, and memorable performances of Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Strauss, Schumann, and Beethoven.

Bychkov’s inaugural season with the Czech Philharmonic in 2018 was celebrated with an international tour that took the Orchestra from performances at home in Prague to concerts in London, New York, and Washington. Dvořák is a major focus throughout the 128th season – in addition to being featured in the season launch and the opening subscription concerts, Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic take Dvořák to audiences in South Korea and Japan, reprising the East Asia tour originally planned for 2020. Later in the season, the Orchestra will bring Dvořák to the major European capitals in celebration of 2024’s Year of Czech Music. 

For the past three seasons, Bychkov’s work with the Czech Philharmonic has focused on the music of Gustav Mahler, with performances of the symphonies at the Rudofinum, on tour and ultimately committed to disc. Pentatone’s Mahler Cycle launched in spring 2022 with the release of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, followed by recordings of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in October and, most recently Symphony No. 2. This season Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 will be performed at the Rudolfinum and in Baden‑Baden. 

Other major projects during Bychkov’s tenure include the commissioning of 14 new works – nine from Czech composers and five commissions from international composers. The symphonies of Detlev Glanert and Julian Anderson were both inspired and named after Prague, Bryce Dessner composed a tone poem inspired by the nature of the Basque Coast where Bychkov lives, and Thierry Escaich and Thomas Larcher composed piano concertos. 

Bychkov’s first major initiative with the Czech Philharmonic was The Tchaikovsky Project – a 7-CD box set devoted to Tchaikovsky’s symphonic repertoire released by Decca and a series of international residencies. Last September, after giving the official concert to mark the Czech Republic’s Presidency of the EU, Bychkov and the Orchestra started the season as guests of the Dvořák Prague International Music Festival, where they gave three concert performances of Dvořák’s Rusalka.

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 Leningrad 1952, Bychkov emigrated to the United States in 1975 and has lived in Europe since the mid-1980’s. Singled out for an extraordinarily privileged musical education from the age of 5, Bychkov studied piano before winning his place at the Glinka Choir School where, aged 13, he received his first lesson in conducting. He was 17 when he was accepted at the Leningrad Conservatory to study with the legendary Ilya Musin and, within three years had won the influential Rachmaninoff Conducting Competition. He left the former Soviet Union in 1975, having been denied his prize of conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic. 

By the time Bychkov returned to Leningrad in 1989 as the Philharmonic’s Principal Guest Conductor, he had enjoyed success in the US as Music Director of the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra and the Buffalo Philharmonic. His International career, which began in France with Opéra de Lyon and at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, took off with a series of high-profile cancellations which resulted in invitations to conduct the New York and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras and the Concertgebouworkest. In 1989, he was named Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris; in 1997, Chief Conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne; and the following year, Chief Conductor of the Dresden Semperoper. 

Bychkov’s symphonic and operatic repertoire is wide-ranging. He conducts in all the major opera houses including La Scala, Opéra national de Paris, Dresden Semperoper, Wiener Staatsoper, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and Teatro Real. While Principal Guest Conductor of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, his productions of Janáček’s Jenůfa, Schubert’s Fierrabras, Puccini’s La boheme, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov each won the prestigious Premio Abbiati. New productions in Vienna have included Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier and Daphne, Wagner’s Lohengrin and Parsifal, and Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina; while in London, he made his operatic debut with a new production of Strauss’ Elektra, and subsequently conducted new productions of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten and Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Recent productions include Strauss’ Elektra at the Paris Opera,
Dvořák’s Rusalka at Covent Garden and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde at Teatro Real in Madrid. 

On the concert platform, the combination of innate musicality and rigorous Russian pedagogy has ensured that Bychkov’s performances are highly anticipated. In the UK, in addition to regular performances with the London Symphony Orchestra, his honorary titles at the Royal Academy of Music and the BBC Symphony Orchestra – with whom he appears annually at the BBC Proms – reflect the warmth of the relationships. In Europe, he tours with the Concertgebouworkest and Munich Philharmonic, as well as being a frequent guest of the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Orchestre National de France and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia; in the US, he can be heard with the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Symphony, Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras. 

Bychkov made extensive recordings for Philips with the Berlin Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio, Concertgebouworkest, Philharmonia, London Philharmonic and Orchestre de Paris. His 13-year collaboration (1997–2010) with WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne produced a series of benchmark recordings that included works by Strauss (Elektra, Daphne, Ein Heldenleben, Metamorphosen, Alpensinfonie, Till Eulenspiegel), Mahler (Symphony No. 3, Das Lied von der Erde), Shostakovich (Symphony Nos. 4, 7, 8, 10, 11), Rachmaninoff (The Bells, Symphonic Dances, Symphony No. 2), Verdi (Requiem), a complete cycle of Brahms Symphonies, and works by Detlev Glanert and York Höller. His recording of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin was recommended by BBC’s Radio 3’s Building a Library (2020); 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). Of The Tchaikovsky Project released in 2019, BBC Music Magazine wrote: “The most beautiful orchestra playing imaginable can be heard on Semyon Bychkov’s 2017 recording with the Czech Philharmonic, in which Decca’s state-of-the‑art recording captures every detail.”

Bychkov was the first musician to express his position on the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, since when he has spoken in support of Ukraine in Prague’s Wenceslas Square; on radio and television in the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Austria, the UK and the USA; written By Invitation for The Economist; and appeared as a guest on BBC World’s HARDtalk. 

In October 2022, Semyon Bychkov was named Musical America’s Conductor of the Year Worldwide. Earlier in the year he received an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal Academy of Music and, in 2015 he was named Conductor of the Year by the International Opera Awards.

The Mystery of Time, possibly Miloslav Kabeláč’s most frequently played work, was finished in 1957. The composition dates from almost the same time as Kabeláč’s third and fourth symphonies. The passacaglia, a historical variation form built upon an ostinato bass line, is not employed literally. It serves as an intellectual point of departure, and it has a symbolic meaning in the work—time constantly flows, and flowing with it are the constant transformations of our lives. The work’s arch form serves as a meditation on the beginning and end of being, on the events of the cosmos, and the inscrutability of its eternal order. In the composition, it is time that determines the dynamic component, building up almost from silence, then gradually dying away. The build-up is influenced by the increasing density of the orchestral writing in ever smaller rhythmic values. In 1961 the composer sent a specimen of the printed score to his teacher Karel Boleslav Jirák in Chicago for his 70th birthday, and in the enclosed letter he confessed: “I modestly regard The Mystery of Time [...] as a work in which all creative elements—musical, artistic, and human—take part equally.” The work was premiered that year on 23 October by the Czech Philharmonic under the baton of Karel Ančerl, who also performed it several times abroad and recorded it in 1964 with the Czech Philharmonic.

Allegretto
Moderato (poco allegretto)
Adagio
Allegro non troppo

In the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Second World War came on the heels of a period that was no less dramatic. In the latter half of the 1930s during the “Great Purge”, the Stalin regime rid itself of more than a million of its ideological enemies amongst intellectuals, politicians, and members of the military. These events drastically afflicted Shostakovich’s birthplace Leningrad. The victims of the political terror included Shostakovich’s friends the stage director Meyerhold and Marshal Tukhachevsky. After Stalin attended the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in January 1936, an article appeared in Pravda with the notorious headline Muddle Instead of Music, and it seemed that Shostakovich’s arrest was inevitable. Ultimately he was not arrested either before or after the war, but fear and anxiety pursued the composer nearly to the end of his life. Stalin’s relationship with Shostakovich was almost incomprehensibly ambivalent, and that relationship was also an important factor in the composer’s life and work. Stalin subjected Shostakovich to public humiliation and harassment while at almost the same time showering him with the highest honours and titles.

Shostakovich himself said he began thinking about the seventh of his 15 symphonies even before the war, and when the Germans arrived at the edge of Leningrad in early September 1941, the first movement was already finished, and he was hard at work on the others. During the months that followed, he wrote the next two movements in the besieged city, then he finished the finale in Kuybyshev (today Samara), where he and his whole family had been evacuated in the middle of October, and where the Seventh Symphony was first performed in March 1942. Soon after the premiere, the story of this work began to live a life of its own, and Stalin’s propaganda tirelessly exploited the work’s image as a symbol of the German occupation and of Russian resilience. It is not without interest that the composition very quickly became popular in the countries of the Western allies as well, and it served their purposes as part of their anti-Hitler political marketing. Ultimately, it was the famed conductor Arturo Toscanini who won the hotly contested rights for the first Western performance, and the symphony was first heard on American soil almost a month before it was heard in Leningrad itself. The popularity of the Seventh Symphony was soon carried over to the person of the composer himself, and it is likely that this attention from the West fanned the flames of Stalin’s intolerance.

Shostakovich himself took little interest in the spontaneous popularity of this work. Through no fault of the composer, the Leningrad Symphony had been turned into a political tool that had little if anything to do with his personal convictions. It is paradoxical that the war of all things gave Shostakovich an opportunity to delve fearlessly into the feelings that had been troubling him long before the German invasion. This is also documented by the words of the author Ilya Ehrenburg, who recalled the wartime years as a period of relative creative freedom for Soviet artists: “It was possible to portray sorrow and destruction”. Shostakovich often spoke of his symphonies including the Seventh as requiems for all the heroes who were never honoured. “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones. Too many of our people died and were buried in places unknown to anyone. I’m willing to write a composition for each of the victims, but that’s impossible, and that’s why I dedicate my music to them all.”

In Leningrad, the city that gave the symphony its name, the circumstances of the first performance were extraordinarily dramatic. At the time, the Germans had already kept Leningrad under siege for nearly a year with devastating effects, and its residents were suffering from the lack of everything a person needs to survive, from food to electricity. Already by then, the number of victims was in the hundreds of thousands. The only orchestra that remained in the city was the Leningrad Radio Orchestra led by the conductor Karl Eliasberg. Of the ensemble’s original 40 members, only about 15 remained; the rest had died of hunger or were sent to the front. Nonetheless, performing the symphony there was a matter of the highest priority, so even the top authorities in Leningrad made every effort to ensure that the concert took place. Understandably, the musical quality of the performance was not comparable to earlier ones whether in Russia or the USA. The atmosphere, however, was unique. The ovation lasted nearly an hour, and people were weeping. “Some wept because it was the only way to express their emotion, others heard a reflection of their everyday lives in the music, still others were weeping for those they had lost, and some were just moved that they were able to go to the Philharmonia and listen to music”, wrote the historian Anna Reid, quoting one of the witnesses. The concert was broadcast on the radio, and according to available reports, among those listening were even the German soldiers outside the city. Many years later, a few of them sought out the conductor Eliasberg and reminisced about that day: “When we heard this music, we said to ourselves—for God’s sake, who is it that we are bombarding? We realised that we could never conquer Leningrad. Its inhabitants were driven by a powerful will to survive that was mightier than hunger, fear, and death.”

Initially, the composer gave programmatic titles to the individual movements of the symphony, but he soon crossed them out, so only the tempo indications of the movements remained. Shostakovich was very opposed to the Leningrad Symphony being interpreted as a musical description of the German occupation. That does not mean, however, that there is even a single bar of the composition that is not permeated by the war. Before Shostakovich abandoned Leningrad, he played the first three movements on the piano for his friends the theatre critics Isaak Glikman and Ivan Sollertinsky with the noise of the ongoing bombardment in the background. During the discussion afterwards, all three realised how remarkably the music corresponded to the environment in which they were then living.

The Leningrad Symphony is one of Shostakovich’s longest works. The first movement alone lasts nearly 30 minutes, and the whole symphony is about an hour and a quarter long. The first movement, Allegretto, begins with a majestic theme in the strings accompanied by the woodwinds. The opening is followed by a calmer passage dominated by a lyrical line for the flute and ending with a dialogue between the piccolo and a solo violin. The most famous passage of the entire symphony now arrives abruptly: a rhythmical march theme with a structure reminiscent of Ravel’s Bolero and a melody based on the tune of a popular aria from Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow. That fact is seemingly the origin of the frequent interpretation of the “march” as the motif of the German invasion. The 22-bar theme is repeated 12 times, and the instrumentation and dynamics build up gradually, growing into the monumental sound of the full orchestra. The opening sequence familiar from the beginning of the movement now returns with the majestic passage followed by the lyrical episode, now represented by a bassoon solo. The opening theme is heard again, then the march motif returns in the brief coda, this time played only by percussion and solo trumpet.

The two middle movements, Moderato (poco allegretto) and Adagio, are very similar in mood: lyrical and calm, evoking nostalgia. In the second movement, there are discernible dance rhythms, while according to Shostakovich, the third movement is intended to depict Leningrad with the sun setting on its streets and the banks of the Neva. The fourth movement, Allegro non troppo, begins with a quiet melodic theme played softly, but the thunderous sound of the full orchestra soon makes itself heard. The character of the finale is fierce, determined, and victorious. The triumphantly optimistic forte in C major is disturbed only by the worrying sound of drums and tympani in the background—evil is still present, and one must remain on guard against it.