Prague Spring • Closing Concert

In the 2022/2023 season, Petr Nekoranec appeared in October 2022 in Florence as Oronte in Handel’s Alcina, opposite Cecilia Bartoli in the title role; in November he performed along with Diana Damrau at the concert Iain Bell and Bel Canto in Prague. In March 2023, he made his debut as Pylade in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride at the Opéra national de Lorraine in Nancy. He returned to the National Theatre in Brno as Tamino (Die Zauberflöte). At the National Theatre in Prague, where he is currently engaged as a soloist, he extended his repertoire, encompassing Almaviva (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Tamino and Ferrando (Così fan tutte), with another two parts: Romeo (Roméo et Juliette) and Don Ottavio (Don Giovanni).

The opera highlights of the 2021/2022 season included performances of Asprando (Nicola Antonio Porpora: Carlo il Calvo) within the Bayreuth Baroque Festival; debuting as Almaviva (October 2021), Tamino (December 2021) and Ferrando (January 2022) at the National Theatre in Prague; appearing as Yurodivy (Boris Godunov) at the Staatsoper Stuttgart, Tamino at the National Theatre in Brno and Almaviva at the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse. In July 2021, he and the pianist William Kelley premiered at the Bach Festival in Świdnica, Poland, the monodrama Comfort Starving by the British composer Iain Bell, with whom Petr closely collaborates.

From 2018 to 2020, Petr Nekoranec was a soloist of the Staatsoper Stuttgart, where he portrayed Almaviva (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Ramiro (La Cenerentola) and Ernesto (Don Pasquale). Between 2016 and 2018, he was the first Czech to participate in the prestigious Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. From 2014 to 2016, he was a member of the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich and its Opera Studio, where his repertoire included the title roles in Le comte Ory and Albert Herring, the latter of which earned him the Bavarian Art Prize (2016). In January 2018, he received the Classic Prague Award in the “Talent of the Year 2017” category. In the autumn of 2019, Supraphon released his profile album French Arias (made with the Czech Philharmonic, conducted by Christopher Franklin). Since the 2021/2022 season, he has been a soloist of the National Theatre Opera in Prague. 

Petr Nekoranec has garnered numerous accolades. In October 2021, he won second prize at the Vincerò World Opera Competition in Naples; in January 2017, he became overall winner of the Concurso Tenor Viñas at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, where he also received the Plácido Domingo Award. In August 2015, he advanced to the semi-final of the Queen Sonja International Singing Competition in Oslo. In July 2014, he came first at the Ljuba Welitsch International Vocal Competition in Vienna, and in September of that year, he won second prize at the Concours International de Chant in Toulouse. When it comes to his native Czech Republic, he received second prize at the 2013 Antonín Dvořák International Vocal Competition in Karlovy Vary.

Petr Nekoranec studied at the Pardubice Conservatory, under the tutelage of Jarmila Chaloupková. He has further honed his skills with the Italian tenor and vocal coach Antonio Carangelo.

Internationally acclaimed British conductor Mark Wiggleshorth (1964) is sought after by opera houses and symphony orchestras all over the world. His detailed performances combine a finely considered architectural structure with great sophistication and, moreover, with a rare beauty that never fails to stir his audiences. His interpretation of Britten’s War Requiem in Cardiff in 2018 was “one of the most visceral and heart-rending… he portrayed the drama of Britten’s choral and orchestral writing as thrillingly as any I remember,” wrote Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times. The conductor is highly respected and well-liked in his native country; in 2017 he received the prestigious Laurence Olivier Award for excellence in the field of opera.

Wigglesworth has close connections with the English National Opera, where he has conducted many works, from Mozart to Leoš Janáček and Alban Berg; he also spent a relatively brief period as its Music Director. He has been collaborating since 2002 with another celebrated opera venue in London – the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, where he was involved in a production of Janáček’s From the House of the Dead. He is regularly invited to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and his debut there in 2005 with The Marriage of Figaro was critically acclaimed: “From the first measures of the overture I realized that this was something out of the ordinary,” wrote Raymond Beegle in a review for the notable American music magazine Fanfare.

The symphonies of Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) stand on the boundary line between programme and absolute music, two of the movements characterising 19^th century orchestral writing. Ludwig van Beethoven, a master of musical structure, endured as a major compositional example and, under the influence of literature, philosophy and other spheres of knowledge, new subject matter found its way into music. Mahler wrote Symphony No. 3 in the years 1892–1896. Its individual parts originally had programme titles, and the symphony as a whole was to have been called The Gay Science after the book of the same name by Friedrich Nietzsche. The first movement “Pan Awakes. Summer Marches In” was a celebration of the rebirth of nature; the second was known as “What the Wild Flowers Tell Me”; the third was “What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me”; the fourth movement originally bore the designation “What Man Tells Me”, followed by “What the Angels Tell Me”; and the final Adagio was entitled “What Love Tells Me”. Mahler later abandoned his titles, however, they were not forgotten and the symphony’s programme subtext remained.

Benjamin Britten (1913–1976 ) first encountered Mahler’s music in 1930 as a student at London’s Royal College of Music when he heard the latter’s Fourth Symphony at a concert given in Queen’s Hall: “After that concert, I made every effort to hear Mahler’s music, in England and on the continent, on the radio and on the gramophone, and in my enthusiasm, I began a great crusade among my friends on behalf of my new god – I must admit with only average success,” wrote Britten in his 1942 article for Tempo magazine “On Behalf of Gustav Mahler”. “[…] It will be realized therefore how glad I was to hear that Messrs. Boosey & Hawkes were considering bringing out several of the movements from the Symphonies of Mahler in separate editions and for slightly reduced orchestras, and how anxious I was to co-operate.” Encouraged by musician and writer Erwin Stein (1885–1958), Britten arranged the second movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 for small orchestra in 1941, namely at a time when the National Socialists on the Continent were endeavouring to erase Mahler’s name from musical history. Stein, an editor for the Vienna-based music publisher Universal Edition, fled to Great Britain to escape Nazism and became an employee of Boosey & Hawkes, where he continued to promote works by composers banned by the Nazis. Britten’s arrangement of Mahler’s symphonic movement was published by this firm in 1950 under the title What the Wild Flowers Tell Me. He stayed faithful to Mahler’s original, nevertheless, the smaller instrumental group lends the work a greater, romanticising intimacy.

Benjamin Britten’s song cycle with orchestra Les Illuminations, set to texts by French poet Arthur Rimbaud, originated in wartime. Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) started work on a collection of prose poems in 1871 which he continued the following year when, together with his friend Paul Verlaine, another of the “poètes maudits”, he travelled on a tour of England and Belgium. The title of the collection, Les Illuminations, was a suggestion from Verlaine; it was first published in 1886. Rimbaud described his take on the world as a “philosophy of barbarism” and maintained that “the idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses.” Likewise, “barbarism” was a term initially ascribed to Mahler’s music, and the composer also shared in Rimbaud’s vehement pursuit of the meaning of life. We will find further associations when we consider the fact that Britten’s musical setting of the poet’s opus was written for Swiss soprano Sophie Wyss (1897–1983), through whose performances he discovered Mahler’s song oeuvre.

Britten began composing his cycle in April 1939 during his voyage to the United States, where he completed the piece five months later. Rimbaud’s text declares in the introductory Fanfare: “I alone have the key to this wild parade”; the sentence occurs several times during the course of the cycle, like a compositional cipher. Villes depicts the bustle of the city and its diversity through a comparison with ancient bacchanalia and other mythological scenes; via the segment Phrase, about notional connecting lines, the composer moves to the part Antique, another classical image – here a tribute to the pagan deities Pan and Dionysus, expressed in a broad melodic line and a gentle waltz rhythm. Royauté is an ironic mockery of human pride, while the exquisite charm of the coastal landscape in Marine is rendered with an almost childlike eagerness. The poem Being Beauteous, which Rimbaud gave an English title, speaks of the beauty of dying, of the nobility of the wounds which mark the dying body, and of the transition to a new life. Parade is ablaze with colour amid a curious masquerade. The cycle ends with Départ: “Seen enough”…

The work was premiered in London’s Aeolian Hall on 30 January 1940 by soloist Sophie Wyss accompanied by the Boyd Neel String Orchestra. The songs can also be sung by a tenor; the first performance of the piece in this vocal range was given by Britten’s life partner, Peter Pears.

On 22 December 1808 the Theater an der Wien in Vienna hosted the premieres of two symphonies by LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827), Symphony No. 5 in C minor Op. 67, which later received the nickname “Fate”, and Symphony No. 6 in F major Op. 68, with its subtitle “Sinfonia pastorale”. Both symphonies were written almost concurrently and were published with successive opus numbers. The two works have much in common yet, in many respects, they are also diametrically opposed.

Symphony No. 6 in F major “Pastoral” is a programmatic work. In Beethoven’s time such compositions were not exceptional; there were numerous pieces in existence bearing titles suggestive of natural phenomena or events. Beethoven’s innovative approach lay in the way he combined his non-musical subject matter with the cyclical symphonic form. The composer also gave his work a subtitle, “Erinnerung an das Landleben” (Recollections of Country Life). By adding the note “mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei” (rather expressive of sensations than of painting), however, he was expressing the wish that his symphony would not be wrongly attributed as “music with a story”. All the same, one cannot ignore tangible examples of explicit tone colour: the depiction of a thunderstorm in the fourth movement or the clearly identifiable imitative bird calls. In his pastoral symphony Beethoven created a succession of genre images. From a formal perspective, by including five movements instead of the usual four, he was inclining towards the structure of a classical drama in five acts. The symphony later provided a model for Hector Berlioz and his Symphonie fantastique, and naturally – including the non-musical aspect – also for Gustav Mahler.

Beethoven’s era perceived the symphony as a drama, and Beethoven’s symphonic oeuvre reinforced this perception through structure, thematic treatment and inner cohesion. Carl Friedrich August Mosengeil (1773–1839) from Meiningen, whom history remembers chiefly as one of the inventors of stenography, was also a writer; when the Pastoral Symphony was published in 1809, he wrote a fervent article in which he consistently referred to Beethoven as a poet, while he described the individual movements as acts in a play. In his view, Beethoven’s musical images differed from what was customary for the time, “in the same way the work of a painter who idealises nature is distinguished from that of an ordinary copyist of it”. In the first movement “Beethoven, whose difficult compositions often make the most accomplished musicians fainthearted, is here so easy and comprehensible, so simple and childlike.” In the second movement the poet Beethoven takes a rest by a stream; the composer was later portrayed in this way in a famous lithograph. Of the third movement Mosengeil states that no-one had hitherto crafted a more authentic representation of nature. The fourth movement provides a contrast to the other movements with its harmonic fluctuations and, within the work as a whole, has the character of a sonata-form development founded on modulation. Here Mosengeil compared Beethoven, the musical dramatist, to Shakespeare. Finally, the storm recedes to make way for the popular image of a pastoral idyll, leaving the listener with “an unforgettable memory which awakens a kind of homesickness.” Mosengeil’s verbal accompaniment to the symphony wasn’t the only piece of writing inspired by Beethoven’s music; other commentaries did not differ greatly from his account, which would nevertheless still be acceptable to today’s audiences.