Czech Philharmonic • Karen Gomyo
To begin the evening, Frenzy by the contemporary American composer John Adams will take us into the depths of madness caused by information overload, then at the concert’s end we turn our attention to Pictures at an Exhibition. In between, we will hear the violinist Karen Gomyo, who likes to think about aspects of music the composer has expressed not in the notation, but between the lines.
Programme
John Adams
Frenzy: a short symphony (2023) (Czech premiere) (18')
Max Bruch
Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26 (25')
— Intermission —
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (arr. by Maurice Ravel)
Pictures at an Exhibition (35')
Performers
Karen Gomyo
violin
Karen Gomyo, a violinist of Japanese descent, is one of the leading figures on the global music scene. She is celebrated for her ability to captivate audiences and forge a deep connection with them through her emotional and heartfelt performances. She was inspired to take up the violin by the violinist Midori, whom she heard perform at a concert in Montreal when she was five years old. A pivotal moment came four years later when she was given the opportunity to play in masterclasses led by the legendary pedagogue Dorothy DeLay—who subsequently invited her to study with her at Juilliard, where Karen Gomyo began her studies at the age of ten. Violinist Mauricio Fuks also played a very important role in her musical journey.
As a soloist, she has performed with numerous orchestras; in the 2025/2026 season, these included the New York Philharmonic, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the National Symphony Orchestra Taiwan, the Residentie Orkest in The Hague, and the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra. She performed with the Czech Philharmonic and Semyon Bychkov during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, when concerts were held under restricted conditions. Most recently, she shone in the Czech Republic in the spring of 2025 during the season-closing concert of the Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava; her performance of Dvořák’s Violin Concerto in A minor under the baton of Gilbert Varga thrilled the audience.
Karen Gomyo is also active in the field of chamber music—she has performed with a wide range of artists, including mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, pianist Enrico Pace, violinist Daishin Kashimoto, cellist Julian Steckel, flutist Emmanuel Pahud, trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth, and guitarist Ismo Eskelinen, with whom she recorded the duet album Carnival on BIS Records.
When she was fourteen, she first heard the music of Ástor Piazzolla, introduced to her by her mother. She was immediately captivated and remains a lover and performer of tango nuevo to this day. She has collaborated with Piazzolla’s longtime pianist and tango legend Pablo Ziegler, as well as bandoneon players Héctor del Curto, JP Joffre, and Marcelo Nisinman. In 2021, she released the album A Piazzolla Trilogy, which she recorded with the Strings of Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire and guitarist Stephanie Jones.
Each season she features a work written by a living composer—these include, for example, the Violin Concerto Adrano by Samy Moussa, Concerto No. 2 Mar’eh by Matthias Pintscher, Xi Wang’s YEAR 2020: Concerto for Violin, Trumpet, and Orchestra, and Samuel Adams’ Chamber concerto—all of which she premiered with leading North American orchestras.
As a violinist, host, and narrator, Karen Gomyo also participated in a documentary film about Antonio Stradivari titled The Mysteries of the Supreme Violin, produced by Japan’s NHK television and broadcast worldwide on the NHK WORLD channel.
Semyon Bychkov conductor
Czech Philharmonic
Student Programme
Dates and tickets
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“There are sounds and ideas suspended in the air, and I find myself overeating, swallowing them up. I can barely manage to write it down on paper”, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky boasted in a letter to a friend in June 1874. He was already at work on a musical tribute to the painter and architect Viktor Hartmann titled Pictures at an Exhibition. Mussorgsky’s dear friend Hartmann had died in August 1873, and the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg held an exhibition of his works, which the composer attended. Inspired by what he had seen, Mussorgsky decided to transform ten of the images into music. The piano original was not played very often, but when Maurice Ravel arranged the work for orchestra in 1922, it became a hit.
Max Bruch’s First Violin Concerto underwent revisions; creating the work did not come easily. “Work is progressing slowly on my Violin Concerto—I don’t feel very secure in this territory. Do you think writing a violin concerto is too daring?” he wrote to his former teacher Hiller in November 1865. Whatever answer he got back, his many revisions finally paid off. The result was the composer’s most famous work.
The opera Nixon in China probably still remains John Adams’s most famous work, but he was again unafraid to tackle a current topic in his recently created composition Frenzy. “For me, ‘frenzy’ sums up the feeling, at times overwhelming, of contemplating the current world around us, especially as it is imagined in our daily doses of digital news and information, much of which we consume without regard to its subversive and subconscious influence on our mood”, Adams says about the composition written three years ago. He dedicated his “short symphony” to Simon Rattle, but at the Rudolfinum we will hear it performed by Semyon Bychkov.