Czech Philharmonic • Open Air Concert

Anna Paulová

clarinet

Despite her youth, Anna Paulová, a winner of the Jiří Bělohlávek Prize, has already enjoyed a number of successes in competitions and on the concert stage. “All musicians have a natural tone colour and personality of their own. One just needs to find that, and not try to imitate anyone else”, says the young clarinettist, who is a laureate of the 2015 Prague Spring International Music Competition (Second Prize, Bohuslava Martinů Foundation Prize, Gideon Klein Foundation Prize) and a semi-finalist of the prestigious ARD International Music Competition in Munich (2019), among other honours. The list of all her successes at international competitions is quite long. “I was very lucky to get into Milan Polák’s studio at the conservatoire; he started sending me to various international competitions right from my first year. First I took part at the conservatoire’s competition, then there were competitions in Italy, Slovenia, Germany, and Poland, and that was a great experience for me. It also motivated me that I was coming home from every competition with the first prize”, says Anna Paulová looking back on her early years of study. She is now a doctoral student at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

Besides Milan Polák, her other teachers at the Prague Conservatoire included Ludmila Peterková, then she studied at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague under Jiří Hlaváč and Vlastimil Mareš. She furthered her studies at the Musikhochschule Lübeck, where she had lessons with Sabine Meyer and Reiner Wehle, at the Royal Conservatoire in Antwerp studying under Annelien van Wauwe, and at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome under the guidance of Alessandro Carbonare. She has developed her performing skill at many masterclasses led by soloists and teachers including Sharon Kam, Shirley Brill, Charles Neidich, Yehuda Gilad, and Martin Fröst.

She began her solo career at age 15, making her debut with the Prague Philharmonia and the conductor Leoš Svárovský. Since then, she has appeared with more top Czech and foreign orchestras including the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Pardubice Chamber Philharmonic, the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic in Zlín, the Münchener Kammerorchester, the Orquestra Cascais e Oeiras in Portugal, and the Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana. In 2014, she made her solo debut with the Czech Philharmonic under the baton of Jiří Bělohlávek.

Besides pursuing a solo career, she also appears in chamber music with many outstanding instrumentalists including Charles Neidich, Ivo Kahánek, Martin Kasík, Václav Hudeček, Tomáš Jamník, and Lubomír Brabec. She performs Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in its original version for basset clarinet, but she otherwise focuses mainly on music by Czech composers of the 20th and 21st centuries (Bohuslav Martinů, Karel Husa, Viktor Kalabis, Josef Páleníček, Miloslav Ištvan, Jiří Teml, Zdeněk Šesták and others). She also collaborates with composers of the younger generation.

Dalia Stasevska

conductor

Dalia Stasevska, the chief conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in Finland, the artistic director of the Lahti International Sibelius Festival, and the principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, was predestined to be a musician from an early age thanks to her parents. She devoted herself intensively to violin playing, but then at age 13 she heard a symphony orchestra for the first time, and the sound thrilled her. She soon began to study scores and to play the violin parts along with recordings—her desire was to be part of the orchestra. She was also fascinated by opera, which was something she did not hesitate to talk about at school: “My friends were listening to the Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys, but I just wanted opera. Whenever we had to do some kind of show and tell at school about what interested us I would always talk about opera. People would boo me, but I’d say ‘No! – Just listen to this magnificent music!’ I knew it was special and I was happy to be different.” The next important event in her musical development occurred at age 20, when she first saw a woman conducting. Until then, it had never occurred to her that besides playing the violin and composing, she could also go down that path. She registered in Jorma Panula’s conducting masterclass, and since then, as she says, she “never let go of the baton”. 

After attending the conservatoire in Tampere, Finland, she studied violin, viola, and conducting at the Sibelius Academy. She is now famous not only in the Nordic countries (she was born in the Ukraine, but she has been living in Finland since the age of five), but also all over Europe and the USA. She collaborates regularly with such orchestras as the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. With the BBC Symphony Orchestra, she toured Japan in the autumn of 2022, and she has already appeared twice at the opening concert of the BBC Proms. They also recently released their joint debut album titled Dalia’s Mixtape, which reveals the conductor’s fascination with contemporary music.

She is an energetic proponent of contemporary works, especially with her “own” Lahti Symphony Orchestra. She routinely performs the music of such composers as Missy Mazzoli, Thomas Adès, Kaija Saariaho, and Outi Tarkiainen. Last season with the Czech Philharmonic, she stood in for the conductor Franz Welser-Möst, performing works by Jean Sibelius and others. At today’s Open Air Concert, she is following up on her busy season, which she has spent with orchestras including the Orchestre de Paris, L’Orchestra dellʼAccademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony.