Czech Chamber Music Society • Dresden Chamber Soloists

Sonata for clarinet, violin, double bass, and piano (world premiere) (18')

Petr Popelka

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.

Robert Oberaigner

clarinet

Robert Oberaigner, principal clarinettist of the Staatskapelle Dresden, has made his reputation as one of the most distinctive performers of his generation. With his focus primarily on contemporary music and historically informed interpretation, he is invited regularly to renowned international festivals (BBC Proms, Lucerne Festival, Salzburg Easter Festival) and famous concert halls (Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Cologne Philharmonic Hall, Vienna Musikverein, Salzburg Mozarteum etc.).

He also appears in a variety of chamber ensembles with such outstanding musicians as Myung-Whun Chung, Leonidas Kavakos, Nils Mönkemeyer, Christian Gerhaher, and Sol Gabetta. In the field of historically informed interpretation, he collaborates frequently with such renowned ensembles as Concerto Köln, the Dresden Festival Orchestra, and Cappella Coloniensis; he has also appeared as a soloist with the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne and the Staatskapelle Dresden. 

With members of that orchestra, he initiated the project “kapelle 21”, the chief goal of which is performing, demonstrating, and interpreting music of the 20th and 21st centuries. As part of that concert series, Oberaigner has already premiered a clarinet concerto dedicated to him by the Italian composer Simone Fontanelli. In 2018 he even made his own debut as a composer in Tokyo, performing his first opus, Tränen der Colombina.

With the pianist Michael Schöch, he makes recordings for the German label Dabringhaus & Grimm. Together they have released the complete works for clarinet and piano by Max Reger and the sonatas of Johannes Brahms. On the Naxos label, he has also recorded works for clarinet by the Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg in collaboration with the conductor Michail Jurowski.

Robert Oberaigner was born in Hall in Tyrol, Austria. He studied at the Tyrol State Conservatoire under Max Bauer and later at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna under Horst Hájek and Johann Hindler. He expanded his awareness of historically informed interpretation under Eric Hoprich at The Hague, and he completed his studies at the University of Music in Lübeck under Sabine Meyer. From 2003 until 2014 he was the principal clarinettist of the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne, and he made guest appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic. Besides performing, he also leads masterclasses in Milan, Beijing, and South Tyrol.

Petr Popelka

piano

In the course of just a few seasons, Petr Popelka has established himself as one of the most inspirational young Czech conductors as he enters the 2024/2025 season in his first year as chief conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. However, Popelka’s engagement in this challenging position (after several years working with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra) does not hinder him from performing other conducting duties in this country as well; he continues to hold the position of chief conductor and artistic director of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra. Besides performing in concerts, he has also devoted himself to opera, having worked, for example, at the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo, at the Semperoper in Dresden, and at Prague’s National Theatre.

However, it was as a double bass player that Popelka got his start. He first studied the instrument in Prague, then in Freiburg, and having finished his studies, he was hired by the Staatskapelle Dresden, where he worked for nearly ten years as the deputy principal double bassist. Despite his stellar conducting career, he can be heard on stage from time to time in chamber music both as a double bass player and as a pianist.