Petr Popelka is one of today’s most successful and most sought-after Czech conductors. He began as a double bass player, studying the instrument first in Prague, then in Freiburg. After his studies, he was hired by the Dresden Staatskapelle, where he spent nearly ten years as the deputy principal double bass player. He had already begun to take an interest in conducting as a student, and that interest was stimulated by his own composing and developed through private lessons. He took part at a number of masterclasses, and he was the assistant to Alan Gilbert, the chief conductor of the NDR Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. In August 2020, Petr Popelka became the chief conductor of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, in September 2022 he assumed the post of chief conductor of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, and finally, from September 2024, he is the new chief conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.
Symptomatically, despite being very busy with his conducting duties, Petr Popelka is not giving up playing chamber music on the double bass and piano. At the same time, he is actively composing his own music. In 2015 at the festival Podium in Mödling, Austria, he conducted his own work, The Labyrinth of the Heart. Popelka had his Scenes for Piano Quartet premiered in 2015 in the Glass Hall at Vienna’s Musikverein, and on 1 May 2023 the Elphier-Quartett premiered Popelka’s composition Synthesis ad lib. in Hamburg.
The Sonata for clarinet, violin, double bass, and piano is a brand new work that Popelka just composed in the autumn of 2024. Although the non-traditional instrumentation is similar to that of Messiaen’s great Quartet for the End of Time, in reality the new composition is related to a different major chamber work, Béla Bartók’s Contrasts for violin, clarinet, and piano (1938), to which Popelka adds his own instrument, the double bass. In Contrasts, Bartók takes a diametrically opposite approach, with mutual combinations of instruments always dominated by one or another of the players. While in Bartók’s the individual movements are not thematically related, in Popelka’s composition, the odd-numbered movements (preludio, intermezzo, and coda alla marcia) give the work a unified framework through mutual interconnections and shared thematic correlations. The weight of the composition, however, lies mainly in the second movement in an expanded scherzo and also in the fourth movement, notturno, which serves the function of a slow movement.
The Four Nocturnes for clarinet and piano (Vier Nachtstücke) were written in 2016 for the clarinettist Robert Oberaigner. They are “music of the night”, and a dreamy, quietly nocturnal atmosphere pervades them. In the first piece, chorale, a simply harmonised fragment of a chorale melody is blended with polytonal chords and other snatches of melodies, then the opening motif returns at the end. In the second piece, recitativo, the clarinet and the piano are in constant dialogue, sometimes merging entirely. The third piece, canzone lontana (distant song), is a simple melody in a two-voice texture and at an extremely quiet dynamic level. In it, the melody moves in micro-intervals lying between the semitones (but not in quartertones), and the piano also departs from the usual tempered tuning with the aid of natural harmonics. The concluding capriccio in the form of a scherzo allows the clarinettist to employ his virtuosity in passagework.
