Czech Philharmonic • Vienna
For its second Viennese concert, the Czech Philharmonic will be joined by the Labèque sisters for Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos. After the intermission, Chief Conductor Semyon Bychkov leads the Czech Philharmonic in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which they recently recorded together to international acclaim.
Programme
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Concerto No. 10 in E flat major for two pianos and orchestra, K 365
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor
Performers
Katia and Marielle Labèque pianos
Semyon Bychkov conductor
Czech Philharmonic
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Performers
Katia & Marielle Labèque pianos
From the Basque region of France, then almost untouched by classical music, to the greatest concert halls in the world – this is the story of the Labèque sisters with a career spanning more than 50 years, who have been described as “the best piano duo in front of an audience today” (New York Times). But the shared story of the sisters, who have had a lifelong and intense relationship both professionally and personally, is much longer. The elder Katia first began playing piano under the tutelage of her mother, a pianist and piano teacher, and two years younger Marielle soon followed suit. In 1968, they entered the Paris Conservatory, but still as two soloists – the idea of forming a piano duo did not arise until after they had graduated from the conservatory, and so they then enrolled in a chamber music class there. They still remember how, while rehearsing Visions de l’Amen, they were suddenly interrupted by Olivier Messiaen, who happened to be passing by their class and wondered who was playing his piece. He was so impressed that he helped them record the work, which was not only their first recording experience but also an important invitation to the world of contemporary composers – after Messiaen, they worked with György Ligeti, Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio. Their career breakthrough came with their original arrangement of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which became one of the first gold records of classical music.
The Labèque sisters have performed in famous concert halls from the Musikverein in Vienna to Carnegie Hall in New York, have been guests at major festivals (BBC Proms, Salzburg, Tanglewood) and have appeared with the most celebrated orchestras in the world (Berlin Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, La Scala Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, etc.). “We don’t have the huge repertoire of a solo pianist or a violinist, but we have all the more freedom to create our own music and our own projects,” say the sisters, who collaborate with Baroque music ensembles (such as The English Baroque Soloists with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Il Giardino Armonico with Giovanni Antonini), but they also venture into the field of “non-artificial” (natural) music (Katia even played in a rock band).
The problem of the limited repertoire for piano duo is also solved by addressing contemporary composers. In addition to the above mentioned, in 2015 they gave the world premiere of Philip Glass’s Double Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel. Two years later they premiered Bryce Dessner’s Concerto for Two Pianos expressly written for them, and recorded it for the album “El Chan”. The Labèques also performed this piece in Prague’s Rudolfinum – although due to the pandemic (2021) without an audience, only in a streamed version. However, this was not the Labèque sisters’ first meeting with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra (whose chief conductor Semyon Bychkov is Marielle Labèque’s husband). In April 2017, the Dvořák Hall witnessed their performance of Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, and a year later they made their solo debut there.
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).
Compositions
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Concerto No. 10 in E Flat Major for two pianos and orchestra, K 365
Few people had as strong an influence on the young Mozart as his older sister Marie Anna. Known at home as Nannerl, she was Wolfgang’s childhood playmate and a confidante to whom he addressed letters from his travels. Besides extraordinary musical talent, the brother and sister also shared the enjoyment of piquant wordplay. Wolfgang held his sister in deep admiration from an early age, learning from Nannerl and sharing his musical ideas with her. Nannerl was a talented pianist, and she made appearances together with her brother both at home in Salzburg and on tours around Europe, but she was forced to cease appearing in public when she reached adulthood; a career as a professional musician was entirely unthinkable for a young woman in those days.
Piano concertos are a common thread running throughout Mozart’s lifetime. In all, he wrote 27 of them, the first when he was 11 years old, and the last just a few weeks before his death. All his life, he worked to achieve perfect mastery of the form, and there is no doubt that his concertos represent one of the highpoints of the genre’s development. Especially in his late works, perfect formal mastery is wed to his practically inexhaustible melodic inventiveness. Moreover, Mozart premiered most of his concertos himself, so he did not hold back in them in terms of either expression or virtuosity.
The Concerto No. 10 in E flat major for two pianos fits perfectly within Mozart’s series of piano concertos. In 1779 while still employed at the court of the archbishop in Salzburg, he wrote the concerto in order to play it himself with Nannerl. The opening movement bristles with joyous energy, and the two soloists compliment each other in a dialogue that is cheerful and light in some places, majestic in others, with richly colourful interjections from the orchestra. The slow and lyrical second movement features a songful melody, and the tender chords of the two pianos are accompanied by the strings and woodwinds. The concluding rondo overflows with virtuosic motifs and themes played successively by the two soloists and the orchestra. The music comes across as a tongue-in-cheek representation of playful sibling rivalry.
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…