Czech Philharmonic • Johan Dalene

Prague Symphony. Lyric Fragments after Franz Kafka (Symphony No. 4) (world premiere) (45')

Detlev Glanert

One of Semyon Bychkov’s artistic goals with the Czech Philharmonic is to perform music by contemporary composers, and not just compositions that have already been written and performed elsewhere. The Czech Philharmonic has approached nine Czech and five foreign composers, who have written or are writing new works for the orchestra. One of them is the 62-year-old composer Detlev Glanert. A native of Hamburg, Germany, he and the chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic share not only a close personal friendship, but also a similar artistic outlook. Bychkov has repeatedly conducted Glanert’s works all around Europe, and he regards him as one of today’s most interesting composers: “I greatly admire Detlev’s music. He’s an outstanding opera composer with a feeling for the text and a sense of drama and philosophy. The first time I heard his Requiem for Hieronymus Bosch, I was brought to tears in several places by how beautiful the music is. That doesn’t happen to me often with contemporary music.”

In recent years, the Czech Philharmonic was supposed to have given three performances of Glanert’s music. In January 2019 there was a performance of the brief orchestral composition Weites Land based on motifs from Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. Then the Czech premiere of the monumental Requiem for Hieronymus Bosch was planned for March 2020. Composed for the 500th anniversary of the great Dutch painter’s death, it was commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of what would have been an extraordinary musical event. A few years later, Glanert’s Prague Symphony met with the same fate, when the Czech Philharmonic was supposed to have become the first orchestra in the world to perform it. While the performance of the symphony has been rescheduled successfully, and the work is finally being given its world premiere in Prague, the artistically and logistically more demanding Requiem, which requires not only a symphony orchestra, but also a quartet of vocal soloists, a narrator, and two choirs, is still awaiting its opportunity.

Detlev Glanert is acclaimed above all as a composer of works for voice and orchestra, and he has 14 operas to his credit. Even in his Prague Symphony, inspired by the Czech capital city and by Franz Kafka, he has not avoided working with a text and the human voice. The composer has written his own libretto using excerpts from Kafka’s lesser-known poetry, which he has entrusted to a pair of singers. Glanert’s teacher was the German opera composer Hanz Werner Henze, but in his music we also observe inspiration from Brahms, Mahler, Strauss, and even Maurice Ravel. Glanert sees the composers of the Second Viennese School as his musical forefathers. At the same time, however, he says that he gives precedence to melodies over tone rows, and he is even unafraid to speak of some kind of musical beauty, however subjectively it may be perceived. Glanert also regards making a connection with the listener as especially important: “A work has to tell you something about what is going on in real people’s lives. It has to tell you something about the world you live in and something about you, personally. This principle applies in opera just like in orchestral music. And if it isn’t there, the work is dead.”

Glanert patterned his latest symphony after Prague itself and after Franz Kafka’s descriptions of the city in his works. “Prague never lets go. Neither of you, nor of me. This little mother has claws”, wrote Kafka to his schoolmate Oskar Pollak. Glanert took inspiration from Kafka’s less familiar poetic texts, letters, and diary entries, and using fragments from them he put together his own libretto. He conceived the symphony as a sequence of twelve songs linked directly together, thereby creating a continuous flow of about 45 minutes of music. For Glanert as an experienced opera composer, the human voice is one of the key media for dramatic communication, and he is also capable of using every nuance of vocal colour to express the whole range of moods and emotions. For his Prague Symphony, he has used lower-pitched voices, mezzo-soprano and bass-baritone. That combination seems to give the best reflection of the sometimes enchanting and sometimes dark mood of Kafkaesque, mystical Prague.

Johan Dalene

violin

22-year-old Swedish-Norwegian violinist Johan Dalene is already making an impact on the international scene, performing with leading orchestras and in celebrated recital halls both at home and abroad. His ability to “make his Stradivarius sing like a master” (Le Monde), coupled with his refreshingly honest musicality and engagement with musicians and audiences alike, has won him countless admirers. This talent was heralded most recently as winner of the Norwegian Soloist Prize and First Prize at the prestigious 2019 Carl Nielsen Competition, which was broadcast to audiences worldwide. In October 2022 he was awarded the “Young Artist of the Year” prize by Gramophone.

Johan’s recent and forthcoming orchestral highlights include his debut at the BBC Proms with the BBC Symphony with Jordan de Souza, debut performances with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra with Sakari Oramo, Czech Philharmonic with Semyon Bychkov, San Francisco Symphony with Esa-Pekka Salonen, London Philharmonic Orchestra with Karina Canellakis and many more.

Johan is equally passionate about chamber music and will be giving a series of recitals in the USA for the first time in Spring 2023, notably at New York’s Carnegie Hall and San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall. Other chamber highlights include a new collaboration with Igor Levit and Julia Hagen, for performances at London’s Wigmore Hall and the Heidelberg Festival. Recently selected as a European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) Rising Star, he performed recitals in some of Europe’s most prestigious concert halls, while also engaging in Education, Learning and Participation work with diverse communities in cities across the ECHO network.

Recording exclusively for BIS, Johan released his third album on the label in March 2022 – it features the Nielsen and Sibelius Concerti, with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic with John Storgards, and garnered Johan his third coveted “Editor’s Choice” from Gramophone Magazine. His second disc of Nordic recital music (released in Spring 2021) received a prestigious Diapason D’Or.

Johan began playing the violin at the age of four and made his professional concerto debut three years later. In Summer 2016, he was student-in-residence at Switzerland’s Verbier Festival and in 2018 was accepted on to the Norwegian Crescendo programme, where he worked closely with mentors Janine Jansen, Leif Ove Andsnes and Gidon Kremer. Today he studies with Per Enoksson, Professor at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, as well as with Janine Jansen, and has also participated in masterclasses with a number of distinguished teachers, including Dora Schwarzberg, Pamela Frank, Gerhard Schulz, and Henning Kraggerud. He has been awarded various scholarships and prizes, notably from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, The Anders Wall Giresta Scholarship, Queen Ingrid’s Honorary Scholarship and many others.

He plays a Stradivarius violin from 1736, generously on loan from the Anders Sveaas’ Charitable Foundation.

Catriona Morison

mezzo-soprano

After having graduated from music school in Glasgow (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), Berlin, and Weimar, the career of the Scottish mezzo-soprano Catriona Morison has been on the ascent step by step. She was a member of the opera studio in Weimar, then she won an engagement at the opera in Wuppertal, but the breakthrough of her career came in 2017 (at age 31), when she was the winner at the famed competition BBC Cardiff Singer of the World. Since then, we have been seeing her routinely on concert stages with famed orchestras such as the Cologne Philharmonic, the Orchestra of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and the Elbephilharmonie and at the festivals in Edinburgh and Salzburg. She has also appeared at the BBC Proms. She has not forgotten about Wuppertal, however, where she recently sang the role of Nerone (The Coronation of Poppaea). 

Her repertoire knows no limits, encompassing works from four centuries including contemporary music. For example, she gave the world premieres of This Frame is Part of the Painting by Errollyn Wallen and of the Prague Symphony by Detlev Glanert, with which she made her Czech Philharmonic debut two years ago. Last season, she stood in at the last moment for the ailing Christa Mayer in Mahler’s Third Symphony.

Christian Immler

bass-baritone

Having grown from a choirboy in the Tölzer Knabenchor into a star bass-baritone who travels to the top concert halls around the world, Christian Immler is known to us mainly as an interpreter of baroque and early classical works, but his repertoire is gradually expanding to include the recital and orchestra tradition of the 19th century and onwards to the works of contemporary composers. He is not neglecting opera productions either.

Besides his vocal studies at London’s Guildhall School of Music (Rudolf Piernay), he also studied musicology. His international career began with victory at the Nadia and Lili Boulanger Competition in Paris, which opened him the door to the world’s top orchestras (BBC Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam) and famed concert halls. He mainly visits those halls with his piano partner of many years, Helmut Deutsch (their joint CD won the prestigious Diapason découverte).

In 2022 he thrilled the Prague public as Pilate in the St John Passion, and soon afterwards he made his successful debut with the Czech Philharmonic in the Prague Symphony by Detlev Glanert.