Czech Philharmonic • New York

It would be impossible not to launch Czech Week at Carnegie Hall in 2024 - the Year of Czech Musi -with the music of Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana to Dvořák experienced the highpoint of his international career in New York, and Smetana’s 200th birthday is being celebrated this year. Smetana’s devotion to the music of his home country led his successors to establish the tradition of celebrating the Year of Czech Music each decade. 

In New York, the orchestra will successively perform all three of Dvořák’s concertos. For the first evening, Chief Conductor and Music Director Semyon Bychkov has chosen the Cello Concerto, one of the most beautiful but also most difficult pieces in that instrument’s repertoire. One can expect a performance close to perfection from the American virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma hailed by critics as one of today’s greatest cellists. 

The orchestra will then perform the first three symphonic poems from Bedřich Smetana’s cycle Má vlast (My Country). Vyšehrad, Vltava (The Moldau), and Šárka are full of beautiful melodies, but their meaning for Czech citizens and other people runs far deeper. Semyon Bychkov had this to say about it:

“The whole time I was studying it, and I was studying it for months, I became obsessed by the piece. And I was trying to understand it: yes, now I know the melodies, I know how it goes. But why does it touch me so much? And I finally found the answer for myself. It is about a homeland; for Czech people, it is about their own homeland. But everybody else has a homeland, too. It means roots; it means attachment; it is about the homeland (not only for the Czech nation) as we want it to be. But our homeland is not always the way we want it to be, historically. And that brings many different things with it: love, conflict, and pain. Because when a homeland is not as we want it to be, there is conflict, tension, and pain. And that is what I feel in the music. Later on, in 1918, Czechoslovakia became independent for the first time; it lasted only twenty years, then came the tragedy of the Nazis, and when that was finished, there came the tragedy of the Soviets. I don’t know how things were in 1938 or 1942, but I do know how it was in 1968, when the Soviet tanks drove into the streets of Prague. I was not in Prague. I was in Saint Petersburg (then called Leningrad), but I know what I felt and what the intelligentsia felt: shame. And so it was not until the Velvet Revolution that the country became truly independent – truly free. And forever, I hope. Why, then, is Má vlast so contemporary? It’s because the conditions we are experiencing today, particularly in Europe, are precisely the same as in the late 19th century. We have a united Europe, but there are so many tensions! And nationalism has become strong again. It is a reaction, because people are worried that because of globalisation, their individuality will not be important anymore. They don’t want to be like everybody else; they want to be the way they are, but they also want to live together. I think the idea of a united Europe is beautiful if it manages to preserve the national identities of all of the members. And if at the same time it is possible for everybody to live together organically. That, in fact, is again why Má vlast is so contemporary. It’s about us and what we are experiencing today. In the end, this is why it touches me so deeply. It’s Má vlast – My Homeland – my own Má vlast.”