Czech Philharmonic • Josef Špaček

“Working with Josef Špaček is amazing. He is a wonderful person with good heart. You can feel this in his playing, which is gracious, teeming with emotion. And his technique is marvellous. He is one of the greatest solo violinists of the present time,” says the conductor Manfred Honeck, under whom the young virtuoso has regularly given concerts, in the Czech Television documentary Devět sezón (Nine Seasons) The 2023 film provides an interesting account of Špaček’s life, also shedding light on his nine-year tenure as the Czech Philharmonic’s concert master.  

Although not having been a member for several years, Josef Špaček has not ceased to collaborate with the Czech Philharmonic, pursuing numerous joint projects. And even though appearing as a soloist with celebrated orchestras worldwide and as a chamber player at the most prestigious concert venues, he continues to perform in Czech towns and remote villages. 

Josef Špaček is a member of the exciting international Trio Zimbalist, giving performances all over the globe. He has regularly appeared in the Czech Republic with the cellist Tomáš Jamník and the pianist Miroslav Sekera, with whom he has created critically acclaimed albums. He has also made recordings with the Czech Philharmonic (featuring Janáček’s and Dvořák’s violin concertos, and Suk’s Fantasy), the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Petr Popelka (Bohuslav Martinů’s music).

Born in 1986 in Třebíč, Bohemia, Josef Špaček showed his exceptional talent at an early age. Music was a natural part of his childhood (his father has been a cellist of the Czech Philharmonic for over three decades, and his siblings played instruments too), as described by his mother in the book Špačci ve fraku. After graduating from the Prague Conservatory 
(under the tutelage of Jaroslav Foltýn), Josef went on to study in the USA, where he attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia (his teachers included Ida Kavafian and Jaime Laredo) and The Julliard School in New York (tutored by Itzak Perlman). 

After completing his formal education, he returned to his homeland, where he was named the youngest ever concert master of the Czech Philharmonic. At the same time, he performed as a soloist and chamber player, garnering international recognition. A watershed in his career was victory at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, whereupon he began receiving invitations from the world’s most renowned institutions. Due to his having an ever more challenging and busy schedule as a musician – and to his family situation, especially following the birth of three children – he resigned from the post of concert master of the Czech Philharmonic so as to focus solely on being a soloist. Owing to his immense talent and great diligence, his childhood dream to become a famous violinist has come to pass.  

An inspirational force, particularly in Czech music, Tomáš Netopil was Principal Guest Conductor with Czech Philharmonic from 2018-2024 performing regularly on tour and at concerts in the Rudolfinum Hall in Prague where he continues to conduct the orchestra’s New Year concerts which are live televised. In 2023/2024 season, Tomáš Netopil conducted opera productions including Janáček’s Jenůfa at the Hamburg Staatsoper and Dvořák’s Rusalka at the Prague National Theatre as well as symphonies with Frankfurt Opera Orchestra, Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava, Naples Philharmonic and Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.

Opera productions in the 2024/2025 season include Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, Die Zauberflote with the New National Theatre Foundation, Tokyo and Don Giovanni with Oper Köln. Netopil explores a wide range of symphonic repertoire in engagements with Oslo Philharmonic, Antwerp, Kuopio and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, Hong Kong Sinfonietta and Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. This season sees a welcome return to L'Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo as well as a debut with Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire. Another return is to Concentus Musicus Wien which builds on his work with period ensembles. As part of the Prague Spring Festival, Netopil will delight audiences with an authentic production of Mozart’s Requiem.

Seven years ago, Tomáš Netopil created the International Summer Music Academy in Kroměříž offering students both exceptional artistic tuition and the opportunity to meet and work with major international musicians. In summer 2021, in association with the Dvořák Prague Festival, the Academy established the Dvořákova Praha Youth Philharmonic with musicians from conservatories and music academies, coached by principal players of the Czech Philharmonic. Tomáš Netopil has held a close relationship with the Dvořák Prague Festival for some time and was Artist-in-Residence in 2017, opening the Festival with Essen Philharmoniker and closing the Festival with Wiener Symphoniker in Dvořák’s Te Deum. 

Tomáš Netopil’s discography for Supraphon includes Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass (the first ever recording of the original 1927 version), Dvořák’s complete cello works, Martinů’s Ariane and Double Concerto, and Smetana’s Má vlast with the Prague Symphony Orchestra with whom he’ll become Chief Conductor and Music Director from 2025/2026 season. During his tenure in Essen, his releases included recordings of Suk Asrael and Mahler Symphony Nos. 2, 3 6 and 9. 

From 2008-2012 Tomáš Netopil held the position of Music Director of the Prague National Theatre. He studied violin and conducting in his native Czech Republic, as well as at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm under the guidance of Professor Jorma Panula. In 2002 he won the 1st Sir Georg Solti Conductors Competition at the Alte Oper Frankfurt.

Leoš Janáček’s operas made him world famous, and the genre was always one of the cornerstones of his oeuvre. He finished writing The Makropulos Affair (Věc Makropulos), the penultimate of his nine stage works, in 1925 at 71 years of age, but the music does not at all resemble the work of a tired, old man. To the contrary, Janáček was bursting with energy during the last period of his life. In 1917 while staying at the spa in Luhačovice, he met Kamila Stösslová, a woman nearly 40 years younger than him, and she became his source of inspiration and muse. Their relationship, which lasted until the end of the composer’s life, was full of tender emotion, but those feelings were much more intense on Janáček’s part. Kamila was flattered by the attentions of the famous composer, but she had no special admiration for his music and seemed to be unaware of the profound influence she was having on Janáček. Nonetheless, their friendship was in the background of one of the most fruitful periods of Janáček’s career, and Kamila became the model for several operatic heroines including Elina Makropulos. 

Čapek’s play about an immortal singer utterly captivated Janáček, who had already dealt with the theme of life’s eternal cycle in his previous opera The Cunning Little Vixen (Příhody lišky Bystroušky). After initial hesitation, Karel Čapek finally gave Janáček permission to adapt the play into an opera, and he even gave the composer a free hand to make cuts and other changes to the action. Janáček turned what had originally been a comic play based on dialogues into a drama about immortality, the desire for love, and the search for the meaning of life, at the end of which the chief heroine dies.

Orchestral suites from operas and ballets were an especially popular genre during the 19th century. The suites could serve as promotion for the works from which they were drawn while bringing popular music to the concert stage in a more condensed form. In his operas, Janáček strove to create compact music dramas with inseparable textual and musical elements. Věc Makropulos is his supreme achievement in this respect. The six-minute prelude to Act I is the only purely instrumental passage, and unlike The Cunning Little Vixen or Káťa Kabanová, the opera lacks orchestral interludes entirely. For this reason, putting together a suite from Věc Makropulos requires significant compositional input. Rather than compiling self-contained instrumental numbers, one must artfully combine shorter passages and motifs, merging them into a whole that is musically meaningful despite the loss of the vocal component. The Czech composer Tomáš Ille created the most recent arrangement at the suggestion of the conductor Tomáš Netopil and finished it not long before its premiere in November 2022. 

Many of Bohuslav Martinů’s works came into being because of external stimuli: requests from performers or commissions from conductors, orchestras, or institutions. The Rhapsody-Concerto for viola and orchestra was commissioned by the violinist and violist Jascha Veissi (1898–1983), a native of Odessa. Since 1920, Veissi had been living in the United States, where he got his start with the Cleveland Orchestra before setting out on a solo career; later on, he worked in other American orchestras. Martinů composed the work in a single month in early 1952. It is regarded as the beginning of the composer’s final creative period, in which he left Neoclassicism behind and arrived at his own original synthesis characterised by a simplification of harmonic resources and by heightened expressivity. The combination of free rhapsodic form with a three-movement layout made it possible to write a solo viola part in a manner that matches its characteristic sound and its technical possibilities. The work develops a central four-note motif that serves the composer as a kind of “motto”. In the first movement, individual episodes follow upon each other loosely, the solo part predominates in the second section, then reminiscences of previous material appear in the finale. The premiere took place on 19 February 1953 with the Cleveland Orchestra led by George Szell and with Jascha Veissi, who had commissioned the work, as the soloist. Veissi also gave the work’s European premiere with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. The first violist to perform the work in this country was Hubert Šimáček, who made the first Czech recording in 1973 with the Prague Symphony Orchestra and the conductor Ladislav Slovák. 

Inspiration from folk music is also characteristic of the works of Vítězslav Novák, who spent part of his youth in Jindřichův Hradec, to which he and his family moved from his birthplace Kamenice nad Lipou, and where he also completed his grammar school studies. This was also the time of Novák’s first attempts at composing, consisting mostly of songs and little piano pieces. As a beginner, he became thoroughly familiar with the music of all of the great Romantic-era composers including Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Berlioz, but the greatest influence on him was the music of Johannes Brahms and especially of Antonín Dvořák, under whose tutelage Novák graduated from the Prague Conservatoire in 1893. 

Vítězslav Novák composed in a wide range of genres including many songs and piano pieces, but he also wrote nearly 30 choruses that often react to current social themes. In the field of orchestral music, he devoted himself mainly to smaller forms, symphonic poems, suites, and overtures, but he also wrote two large-scale symphonies combining vocal and instrumental forces. Novák’s compositional style underwent development comparable to that of his contemporary Richard Strauss. He was influenced by Impression, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau, and he also experimented with extended tonality, but he never left tonality entirely behind. Overall, Novák’s music retained the character of Late Romanticism.

Like Strauss, Vítězslav Novák found inspiration in nature. Slovakia’s Tatra Mountains enchanted him, and at the age of 26 he made his first visit to Velké Karlovice in Moravian Wallachia. He quickly fell in love with the distinctive region, which awakened his interest in folklore motifs. This is also reflected in his Moravian-Slovak Suite (1903). Novák conceived the work as a series of scenes illustrating a day of festive celebration in the Moravian countryside. The five-movement cycle is inspired by folk singing. The first movement, In the Church, quotes a Protestant hymn, and in the movement The Country Musicians, the composer takes inspiration from the verbuňk, a “recruiting dance” from Horňácko (a region of Upper Moravian Slovakia). In his Moravian-Slovak Suite, Novák employs a small orchestra including harp and organ. Those two instruments combine with the lyrical sound of the strings and the tenderness of the woodwinds to create the extraordinarily poetic, picturesque atmosphere of what is one of Novák’s most popular compositions.