Czech Philharmonic • Kristian Bezuidenhout
When Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 was last heard at the Rudolfinum, the Czech Philharmonic received one of its most frenetic standing ovations. This is one reason why Chief Conductor Semyon Bychkov is programming the Fifth Symphony again three years later, this time alongside historically informed performances of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 with soloist Kristian Bezuidenhout.
Programme
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K 503 (32')
— Intermission —
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor (73')
Performers
Kristian Bezuidenhout piano, play-conduct
Semyon Bychkov conductor
Czech Philharmonic
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If a Mahler symphony opens with a trumpet solo, one can be sure that one is listening to the Fifth. And this is not the only well-known motif from this beautiful work which has etched itself in the memories of audiences, including, of course, through its use by the great Italian director Luchino Visconti in his Death in Venice, a filmic adaptation of Thomas Mann’s existentialist novel of the same name.
Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor has continued to inspire and thrill since its premiere 120 years ago in Cologne, so it is no surprise that the Prague public gave an exceptionally enthusiastic welcome to Semyon Bychkov’s carefully prepared performances in 2021. As the British music critic Norman Lebrecht said of the orchestra’s recording of the Fifth with its Chief Conductor, “Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic are setting the pace for Mahler on record in this decade… I can find no flaw in this production. It is as gripping a Mahler Fifth as you will hear anywhere and that burnished Czech sound will linger long in the ear. The orchestra is immeasurably more virtuosic these days than it was in its previous Mahler cycle, nearly half a century ago with Vaclav Neumann, yet its ethos in Mahler remains inimitable.”
In the accompanying performances of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25, Australian pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout deserves no less attention. A world traveller based in London, he is a respected figure in the field of historically informed music making focusing on the era preceding Romanticism which reached its zenith with Mahler. To be more precise, Bezuidenhout prefers to describe his approach as “historically inspired”, meaning that he is not striving for historical “purism”, but for authenticity in terms of his own artistic conception of a work. It is an approach for which he has already received much acclaim including for his biggest recording project to date – Mozart’s complete piano music for Harmonia Mundi – which has won several international awards.
Performers
Semyon Bychkov conductor
In addition to conducting at Prague’s Rudolfinum, Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic in the 2023/2024 season, took the all Dvořák programmes to Korea and across Japan with three concerts at Tokyo’s famed Suntory Hall. In spring, an extensive European tour took the programmes to Spain, Austria, Germany, Belgium, and France and, at the end of year 2024, the Year of Czech Music culminated with three concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York.
Among the significant joint achievements of Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic is the release of a 7-CD box set devoted to Tchaikovsky’s symphonic repertoire and a series of international residencies. In 2024, Semjon Byčkov with the Czech Philharmonic concentrated on recording Czech music – a CD was released with Bedřich Smetanaʼs My Homeland and Antonín Dvořákʼs last three symphonies and ouvertures.
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 awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in July 2022. 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).
Semyon 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).
Kristian Bezuidenhout piano
A performer who is capable of alternating between several different fortepianos built by a variety of instrument makers during a single recital; a pianist who has no problem with playing a modern piano at one concert, a fortepiano at the next, and a harpsichord soon afterwards; an artist who often even conducts from the keyboard and who does all of these things to maximise the realisation of his interpretive intentions. This is Kristian Bezuidenhout, artistic director of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the English Concert, whose domain is the repertoire of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
He won international fame mainly thanks to winning the Bruges Fortepiano Competition at 21 years of age. However, unlike some of his artistic colleagues, Bezuidenhout was not caught off guard by the career of an artist travelling around the world—he was already alternating between four continents. Born in South Africa, he began his musical studies in Australia and completed them in New York (Eastman School of Music); he now lives in London. He has won acclaim mainly as a player of historical instruments, although as a performer of early music, he avoids expressions like “authentic interpretation”, preferring the phrase “historically inspired”. He makes no attempt at historical “purism”; his goal is to be authentic to his own interpretive path, which he says he achieves better in most cases on historical instruments. And because every composition requires something a bit different, he does not hesitate even to use several different historical instruments at a single concert.
Besides in solo recitals, he is often heard as a soloist with top ensembles specialising in early music such as Les Arts Florissants or the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; with some other ensembles (Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century etc.), he likes to conduct from the piano as well. Combining the roles of soloist and conductor allows him maximum immersion not only in the solo part, but also in the score as a whole. He does not hesitate to share with listeners his comprehensive ideas about music of the 18th century and its interpretation in many interviews and educational videos.
His conscientious approach to interpretation is also reflected in such series of recordings as the complete cycle of piano concertos by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Mozart (ECHO Klassik) recorded with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. Bezuidenhout has devoted himself to Mozart with great intensity for a number of years. For the Harmonia Mundi label, he recorded W. A Mozart’s complete mature solo works for the fortepiano (works for harpsichord dating from Mozart’s childhood were not included). That project not only earned him the Wiener Flötenuhr, a Viennese prize for Mozart recordings, but also was honoured with the Diapason d’Or. Besides performing the Viennese classics, he also sometimes explores repertoire of earlier (Bach’s sonatas for violin and harpsichord, which he has recorded with Isabelle Faust) or later periods (Schubert’s Winterreise with Mark Padmore).
Compositions
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K 503
When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K 503, did he realise that listeners were unprepared for his conception of the concerto genre and that the work would spend a full 147 years on its journey back to the concert stage? The composer performed the concerto in Vienna on 5 December 1786, a day after its completion, then the following year he repeated his performance and also played the concerto in Leipzig. After that, it was not heard again at a concert until 1934, when Artur Schnabel played the solo part with the Vienna Philharmonic led by George Szell. It took another ten years for the work to solidify its place in the piano repertoire, and it has come to be viewed entirely differently—we now regard it as one of Mozart’s most magnificent works, paving the way in the genre not only for Beethoven, but also for the whole 19th century. The Czech Philharmonic recorded this concerto in 1974 on the Supraphon label with the legendary Mozart interpreter Ivan Moravec under the baton of Josef Vlach.
Mozart began devoting himself to the piano concerto genre at around age 20, modelling works after known examples by Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715–1777), who was active in Vienna, and Johann Christian Bach (the “London Bach”, 1735–1782). During his years of success from 1784 to 1786, when he wrote 12 piano concertos numbered among his masterpieces, he engaged in polemics with his predecessors on the pages of his scores, advancing the genre beyond merely entertaining, pleasingly predictable pieces for high society. He often composed with himself in mind as the performer, he took more notice of the colours of the instrumental sections, and his content reached surprising depths, where even complex counterpoint flows along in the currents.
In his Piano Concerto No. 25, Mozart truly broke new ground, and for the purpose he chose the heroically triumphant key of C major to avail himself of the brilliance of trumpets and timpani (whilst foregoing his beloved clarinets). The work exhibits perfect unity in diversity and is unusually symphonic and polyphonic for its day, especially in the opening Allegro maestoso, where we witness many contrasts of expression. In the middle section, the composer seems to have a premonition of the melody of the Marseillaise, which was not written until 1792, nearly six years after the concerto was finished. The slow movement that follows is an echo of the lovely tenderness of Mozart’s operatic duets, with the piano engaging in a heartfelt dialogue mainly with the wind instruments. The concluding rondo Allegretto begins with a dance theme from the composer’s opera Idomeneo. Although serious ideas are concealed beneath the typically exciting Mozartian energy, the concerto proceeds optimistically. The concerto’s exceptional craftsmanship is worthy of comparison to Mozart’s very last symphonic work, the Symphony No. 41 in C major “Jupiter”, K 551 (1788).
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 5 in C Sharp Minor
Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) began writing his Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1901, after a close brush with death: in February he had nearly succumbed to a severe haemorrhage and was saved only by a timely surgical intervention. “As I wavered at the boundary between life and death, I was wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to be done with it right away because everyone ends up there eventually”, he wrote later on. By then, Mahler was already well acquainted with death—seven of his twelve younger siblings did not live to the age of two, his brother Ernst died at age 13, and in 1895 Otto committed suicide at the age of 21. Four years later, the composer buried both of his parents and his younger sister Poldi. This may be why Mahler’s works are unusually full of funeral marches, one of which actually begins his Fifth Symphony.
Mahler greeted the dawn of the twentieth century in a sombre mood. Almost simultaneously, he was composing two cycles on poems by Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866): the Rückert-Lieder and Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), undoubtedly two of the most beautiful song cycles in world literature. (In the Kindertotenlieder, Rückert vented his grief over the loss of both his children, who died of scarlet fever within a mere three weeks at the turn of 1834. Rückert poured out his deep sorrow in a collection of more than 400 poems, only published posthumously, in 1872). At the same time as the songs, Mahler was composing his Symphony No. 5, which opens with unmistakable “fate” fanfares, already anticipated in the first movement of his Fourth Symphony (after which a dance of death is played on the fiddle by the skeleton Freund Hein in the second movement). The first two movements of the new symphony continue in the same vein: “Their content is terribly sad, and I suffered greatly having to write them; I also suffer at the thought that the world shall have to listen to them one day”, he told his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner (1858–1921). About his symphony, he further noted that it would be “in accordance with all rules, in four movements, each being independent and self-contained, held together only by a similar mood.” It is hard to say how the work might have turned out had Mahler’s life not taken an unexpected turn on 7 November 1901 with the appearance of the young Alma Schindler (1879–1964), who immediately captivated Gustav with her spontaneity. As she later wrote in her diary: “That fellow is made of pure oxygen. Whoever gets close to him will burn up.” They were betrothed in December, Alma became pregnant in January, and the wedding took place on 9 March 1902 at Vienna’s Karlskirche.
The Fifth Symphony is yet another example of Mahler’s innovative approach to form. It consists of five movements grouped into three parts. Part I comprises the opening two movements, which are thematically linked; the first may be understood as an introduction to the symphony as a whole, while the second functions as the first movement proper. The symphony’s central weight is carried by the monumental Scherzo (Part II). The transparently orchestrated Adagietto serves as a kind of intermezzo before the finale, with which it forms Part III of the work. Scored only for strings and harp, the Adagietto has become the most popular movement of the symphony and is often regarded as a declaration of love to Alma. In contrast to the oppressive funerary atmosphere of the opening two movements, it has sometimes been interpreted as a triumph of love over death; however, this view is contradicted by its later use in Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice…
The composer conducted the premiere of his Fifth Symphony in Cologne on 18 October 1904. The performance was met with whistles of disapproval, while critics dismissed the work as an “appalling cacophony” marked by “perpetual confusion”. After the premiere, Mahler commented laconically: “No one understood it. I wish I could conduct the premiere 50 years after my death.” Who knows—perhaps Mahler from the perspective of eternity may rejoice in the continuing success of his Fifth Symphony and his other works, still performed on concert stages more than a century after their creation. Yet it is now a mortal conductor who must carry the music forward, along the river of time…