Czech Philharmonic • Yuja Wang

Pianist Yuja Wang is celebrated for her charismatic artistry, emotional honesty and captivating stage presence. She has performed with the world’s most venerated conductors, musicians and ensembles, and is renowned not only for her virtuosity, but her spontaneous and lively performances, famously telling the New York Times. “I firmly believe every program should have its own life, and be a representation of how I feel at the moment”. This skill and charisma was recently demonstrated in her performance of Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2 at Carnegie Hall’s Opening Night Gala in October 2021, following its historic 572 days of closure.

Yuja was born into a musical family in Beijing. After childhood piano studies in China, she received advanced training in Canada and at the Curtis Institute of Music under Gary Graffman. Her international breakthrough came in 2007, when she replaced Martha Argerich as soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Two years later, she signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon, and has since established her place among the world’s leading artists, with a succession of critically acclaimed performances and recordings. She was named Musical America’s Artist of the Year in 2017, and in 2021 received an Opus Klassik Award for her world-premiere recording of John Adams’ Must the Devil Have all the Good Tunes? with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel.

As a chamber musician, Yuja has developed long lasting partnerships with several leading artists, notably violinist Leonidas Kavakos, with whom she has recorded the complete Brahms violin sonatas and will be performing duo recitals in America in the Autumn. In 2022, Yuja embarks on a highly-anticipated international recital tour, which sees her perform in world-class venues across North America, Europe and Asia, astounding audiences once more with her flair, technical ability and exceptional artistry in a wide-ranging programme to include Bach, Beethoven and Schoenberg.

Dramatic soprano Evelina Dobračeva began her musical career studying accordion, conducting and teaching in her hometown Syzran, Russia. She graduated with a diploma before relocating to Germany, where she began singing under the tuition of Norma Sharp, Snezana Nena Brzakovic and Julia Varady at the Hanns Eisler Music College Berlin. She claimed the highest level of scholarship from the German Republic and was a prize winner at the Würzburg Mozart Competition in 2006.

She performed at the Bayerische Staatsoper (Khovanshina), Cincinnati Opera (Tosca), Bolshoi Theatre (Pique Dame) and Theater St Gallen (Onegin and Fidelio). In concert she has recently sung Erwartung with the Capella Cracoviensis, the War Requiem with the LPO conducted by Vladimir Jurovsky, at Musikverein Vienna; Carnegie Hall and with the Spanish Radio, Verdi Requiem with the Scottish Orchestra, Mozarteum Salzburg, The Bells with Santa Cecilia Orchestra and Shostakovich 14 with Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

The Czech mezzo-soprano Lucie Hilscherová makes guest appearances at the National Theatre in Prague, the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre in Ostrava, the J. K. Tyl Theatre in Pilsen, the Silesian Theatre in Opava, the State Theatre in Košice, and the Mannheim National Theatre. She has also appeared as Háta in The Bartered Bride in Tokyo (2010, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, Suntory Hall, conductor Leoš Svárovský) and London (2011, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Barbican Hall, conductor Jiří Bělohlávek).

She is in demand for concert performances of the lieder and oratorio repertoire, and she also enjoys interpreting the works of contemporary composers. She has collaborated with important orchestras and conductors, appearing at such festivals as Musikfest Stuttgart, Beethovenfest Bonn, Grafenegg Musik-Sommer, Prague Spring, the Easter Festival of Sacred Music in Brno, Smetana’s Litomyšl, the St. Wenceslas Music Festival, and the Peter Dvorský International Music Festival in Jaroměřice.

Aleš Briscein studied clarinet, saxophone and opera singing at the Prague Conservatory. He has participated in prestigious festivals (Edinburgh International Festival or Prague Spring) and collaborated with outstanding orchestras and conductors, including Christoph von Dohnányi, Valery Gergiev, Sir John Eliot Gardiner or Tomáš Netopil.

Recent highlights include Der fliegende Holländer in Prague, War and Peace in Geneva, Makropulos Affair at Salzburg Festival, Dalibor and Die Königskinder in Frankfurt, Die tote Stadt in Berlin and Dresden, From the House of the Dead in Munich, Wozzeck in Vienna, Jenůfa in Bologna, Così fan tutte and Mazeppa in Berlin, Lohengrin in Erl and Two Widows in Angers and Nantes. His concert repertoire includes, among others, Mahler’s 8th symphony, Beethoven's 9th symphony and Missa solemnis, Dvořák’s Stabat mater, as well as Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass, or Stravinsky’s Les Noces.

Bass-baritone Boris Prýgl ranks among the most talented Czech young singers. He successfully went through the Young Artists program of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where he has assumed the roles of Morales in Carmen, Ping in Turandot, the prince Ottokar in Der Freischütz, the Hunter in Rusalka, etc. His artistic commitments in the 2021/2022 season include the roles of Guglielmo in Così fan tutte at the National Theatre in Prague and Don Giovanni at the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava, a concert with Pretty Yende at the Smetana Hall in Prague, Dvořák's Rusalka (Gamekeeper) with the Czech Philharmonic under the baton of Semyon Bychkov, an advent recital in Prague, and others.

Boris Prýgl is a laureate of several singing competitions and the absolute winner of the 2015 Antonín Dvořák Singing Competition in Karlovy Vary. In July 2017, he was a finalist of Belvedere and Plácido Domingo’s Operalia. In September 2019, he was granted the award of the then Director of the Vienna State Opera Dominique Meyer at the Stella Maris Vocal Competition. He graduated from the Academy of Music in Bratislava and gained his first stage experience at the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava.

Daniela Valtová Kosinová is a graduate of the Pardubice Conservatoire and of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She won third prize and the title of laureate at the International Organ Competition in Brno in 2002. She is the principal organist of the Prague Symphony Orchestra. She gives concerts all around Europe. In the Czech Republic she is a guest at leading music festivals (Prague Spring, Smetana’s Litomyšl, Janáček May Festival etc.), and she collaborates with important soloists and ensembles.

She has performed the organ solos in Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass many times with the Prague Symphony Orchestra, in 2015 with the Czech Philharmonic and Jiří Bělohlávek at Vienna’s Musikverein, in 2018 with the Flemish Symphony Orchestra on a tour of Belgium, and this year with the Czech Philharmonic in Prague and on a European tour (Vienna, Hamburg, London). With the mezzo-soprano Jarmila Kosinová and the actor Jan Potměšil she created the concert programme Music Between the Words, which has been presented successfully all over the Czech Republic.

She also composes, and her works have been played at many concerts in this country and abroad. In 2010 she issued the jazz album Meeting Point featuring her own music.

The Prague Philharmonic Choir (PPC), founded in 1935 by the choirmaster Jan Kühn, is the oldest professional mixed choir in the Czech Republic. Their current choirmaster and artistic director is Lukáš Vasilek, and the second choirmaster is Lukáš Kozubík.

The choir has earned the highest acclaim in the oratorio and cantata repertoire, performing with the world’s most famous orchestras. In this country, they collaborate regularly with the Czech Philharmonic and the Prague Philharmonia. They also perform opera as the choir-in-residence of the opera festival in Bregenz, Austria.

This season, they will appear at four choral concerts of their own, with programmes focusing mainly on difficult, lesser-known works of the choral repertoire. Again this year they will be devoting themselves to educational projects: for voice students, they are organising the Academy of Choral Singing, and for young children there is a cycle of educational concerts.

The choir has been honoured with the 2018 Classic Prague Award and the 2022 Antonín Dvořák Prize.

Lukáš Vasilek studied conducting and musicology. Since 2007, he has been the chief choirmaster of the Prague Philharmonic Choir (PPC). Most of his artistic work with the choir consists of rehearsing and performing the a cappella repertoire and preparing the choir to perform in large-scale cantatas, oratorios, and operatic projects, during which he collaborates with world-famous conductors and orchestras (such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Czech Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic, and the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic).

Besides leading the PPC, he also engages in other artistic activities, especially in collaboration with the vocal ensemble Martinů Voices, which he founded in 2010. As a conductor or choirmaster, his name appears on a large number of recordings that the PPC have made for important international labels (Decca Classics, Supraphon); in recent years, he has been devoting himself systematically to the recording of Bohuslava Martinů’s choral music. His recordings have received extraordinary acclaim abroad and have earned honours including awards from the prestigious journals Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, and Diapason.

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).

In the grey period of “Normalisation” during the 1980s, the concerts of the ensemble Agon were a revelation. For isolated Czech listeners, that extraordinary ensemble opened up a window through which it was possible to hear compositions of the avant-garde from around the world. Three composers were behind the ensemble’s inception: Miroslav Pudlák, Petr Kofroň, and Martin Smolka. The latter is mainly associated by most of the Czech music loving public with the opera Nagano, which he composed on commission for the National Theatre in Prague, and for which he won the Alfréd Radok Award in 2004. However, Smolka’s music is heard more often abroad, and his compositions are commissioned by Europe’s most renowned ensembles and festivals.

This is also the case with Agnus Dei, which was commissioned by the radio choir in Stuttgart, which premiered the work on 14 July 2012. Martin Smolka conceived his Agnus Dei for two mixed choirs as a little Requiem for his father, the musicologist and composer Jaroslav Smolka (1933–2011). The author himself tells us about the composition’s sources of inspiration:

“What were the guideposts of my childhood? Bartók’s Mikrokosmos. Martinů’s Songs on Two Pages. At the piano, our father taught us all about music and accompanied our singing. His massive fingers were not completely agile, but all the more passionate was his love for unusually harmonic combinations and for intense, majestic operatic singing. That passion always wins out for a moment when we sing through the collection of Martinů songs and reach ‘Dievča umiralo’ (The Girl Was Dying). The children take a break, and papa sings until the window panes start vibrating: ‘...she still called out: In the hereafter, whose will you be, young fellows?’ I was always surprised at how energetic and gay the girl is while she is dying.

Everyone in Prague’s musical community knew Jaroslav Smolka. Music history at the Academy of Performing Arts, musical books and dictionaries, producing gramophone records, reviews; he was everywhere and could not be overlooked. Wherever he went, dates, key signatures, opus number, themes of compositions, contexts, and anecdotes just poured out of his head. When he departed for the hereafter ten years ago, I spontaneously began setting the Agnus Dei from the Requiem to music. And something from those guideposts from childhood has stayed with me. From Bartók there are the narrow canons, the friction of seconds, and the simultaneous sounding of major and minor. From Martinů there are quotes of unusual harmonic combinations along with the tune about dying. Incidentally, that melody is in the ‘Podhale mode’, which has an augmented or Lydian fourth degree, but also a lowered seventh degree. It could be said to mirror the 8th through the 14th tones of the overtone series, so it truly has its roots in nature.

‘Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of the world, grant them eternal rest. May light eternal shine upon them, amen.’ In the Latin text, the word ‘eternal’ is even present in two synonyms: ‘aeternam’ and ‘sempiternam’.”

Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff lived at the turn of an epoch. He was born in 1873 to an aristocratic family in imperial Russia. Right after the October Revolution, in December 1917 he and his whole family emigrated by way of Copenhagen and Stockholm to the USA, and he never returned to Russia. He spent the interwar period in Europe, mainly in France and later in Switzerland in a villa beside Lake Lucerne. Before the Second World War, he fled back to the USA.

The music he composed is also influenced by the arrival of the new epoch. He studied at the Moscow Conservatoire, where he was directly influenced by an encounter with Tchaikovsky, with whom he shared the same opinion about the importance of a strong melody capable of lasting for ages. All his life, Rachmaninoff devoted himself to his three talents, working as a piano virtuoso, conductor, and composer. He was admired by his contemporaries mainly as a performer. He gave countless concert tours, so he did not have much time left for composing. His compositions were often dismissed as old-fashioned and were seen as antithetical to the music of his two radical contemporaries: Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

Rachmaninoff composed his opus one, the Piano Concerto No. 1 in F sharp minor, in 1891 while still a student at the conservatoire at the threshold of adulthood. He dedicated the work to his cousin Alexandr Siloti, also an excellent pianist (his teachers included F. Liszt), thanks to whom he began studying in Moscow at the age of twelve under the renowned teacher Nikolai Sergeyevich Zverev. The composer premiered the first movement of his own concerto on 17 March 1892, and conducting the student orchestra was Vasily Safonov, director of the Moscow Conservatoire at the time.

Rachmaninoff often revised his compositions, and in the case of his opus one, the revisions were more radical than usual. In the autumn of 1917 he thoroughly rewrote the concerto, among other things composing a new central tutti passage in the first movement, rewriting the first half of the lengthy piano cadenza, altering the stylisation of the piano part, and retouching the orchestration. The final version is more colourful and more pianistically grateful, and therefore it has also found a place in the concert repertoire. He began making revisions in September and finished them on 10 November. Meanwhile, shots were fired from the Aurora, the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg had fallen, and the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia. Rachmaninoff left Russia forever, so the new version of the Piano Concerto No. 1 in F sharp minor was first heard on 2 January in New York under the baton of Modest Alschuler and with the composer at the piano.

Among great creative figures, Leoš Janáček is remarkable in that the older he got, the more “youthful”, original, and modern the music that he wrote became. This was perhaps because he had lost everything. Released by the cruelty of fate from his ties and concerns for his parents and his children, he was truly able to find himself. He cast aside conventions and tried to get to the heart of things.

Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass is one of the most powerful sacred compositions in music history. The 72-year-old composer wrote the music to the text in Old Church Slavonic in 1926 at his favourite spa, Luhačovice. “The rain in Luhačovice is pouring, just pouring. I look out of the window at the gloomy mountain Komoň. The clouds come rolling in, and the wind tears and scatters them. […] The darkness becomes denser and denser. Now I look out into the black of night; lightning slashes into the darkness.” That is how Janáček described the atmosphere that August, when he began writing his Glagolitic Mass. The decision was made quickly. Although he had taken an interest in the Old Church Slavonic text of the Mass a few years beforehand and had made a few sketches, the music that he ultimately began writing in Luhačovice had nothing in common with those sketches. For Janáček, starting the new work was quite emotional. His ideas had to mature, but once creative fervour had taken hold, he composed quickly. He sketched out the entire Mass in just three weeks! By October 1926, he had finished it. He made more quite substantial changes after the premiere, which took place on 5 December 1927 in Brno. Janáček was able to make cuts. He is never verbose; he is precise.

For example, in the movement “Věruju” (Credo) he shortened the orchestral interlude that contained a very powerful passage inducing the atmosphere before the choir begins singing about Christ’s crucifixion. Janáček originally scored this harsh passage for three (!) sets of tympani, and he combined them with expressive music for brass and organ. In a letter to Kamila Stösslová he wrote: “…so I’m doing a bit of a depiction of the legend that when Christ was stretched out on the cross, the heavens were torn. So I wrote rumbling and lightning…” His wife Zdena supposedly told him: “Leoš, that’s impossible; you’re cursing at the Lord God there.” And a while later Janáček said: “So I’ve gotten rid of the tympani there…”

Although the Glagolitic Mass is a musical setting of a liturgical text, the work is not confessional in character. To Ludvík Kundera’s review, in which he called the composer an “old man” and a “firm believer”, Janáček’s reply was “No old man, no believer, you youngster”. This is often quoted, but we must take it with a grain of salt. Janáček was unquestionably a spiritual person. He was raised in the environment of the church at the Benedictine Monastery in Old Brno. However, he was not a practicing Catholic. We know only that he brought his children up in faith and prayer. He apparently felt distanced from the Catholic Church, so he was attracted to the idea of writing a Mass, but to the Old Church Slavonic text.