P1 / Opening concert with Isabelle Faust

In the Year of Czech Music 2024, Antonín Dvořák cannot be missing from the opening of the season. His Violin Concerto will be performed by leading German soloist Isabelle Faust, who also recorded the piece in Prague a few years ago for release on audio CD. As the winner of the 1993 Paganini Competition in Genoa, she has been playing a rare Stradivari violin crafted in 1704 and named “Sleeping Beauty” for almost three decades. Another Czech author included in the programme is Jan Klusák, who will be ninety years old in April 2024. As one of the first domestic creators, he was inclined to use rational compositional techniques, but this was done in order to achieve an emotional effect. In addition to concert works, he wrote a lot of incidental music, and from the sixties, he also worked in film, not only as a composer but also as an actor. When he became politically undesirable during the period of “Normalisation” following the suppression of the Prague Spring, he served in both capacities at the Jára Cimrman Theatre. At the end of the 1990s, he opened a series of symphonic poems with the composition Zemský ráj to na pohled (Earthly Paradise). The premiere of the fourth, Continuo, is a hotly anticipated event. Later, listening to Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, one can reflect on the paradox that a work of art can be interpreted in two contradictory ways. The accessible symphonic composition, with its balance of meditation, humour and grandeur, was perceived by the communist regime as the author’s obedient response to criticism that he was distancing himself from the people. But audiences sensed hidden messages in it – an honest portrayal of the feelings of a Soviet man suffering under Stalin’s terror, with its forced optimism.