Czech Philharmonic • Herbert Blomstedt
Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony was its composer’s crowning success, while Franz Berwald’s Sinfonie singulière was not premiered until decades after it was written. For many years, Herbert Blomstedt has been championing performances of works composed by his Swedish compatriot. He will lead the Czech Philharmonic at the time of the 70th anniversary of the beginning of his conducting career.
Programme
Franz Berwald
Symphony No. 3 in C major “Sinfonie singulière”
Antonín Dvořák
Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88
Performers
Herbert Blomstedt conductor
Czech Philharmonic
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Franz Berwald worked as a physiotherapist, and besides operating a medical gymnastics clinic, he managed a glassworks and a brickyard. Despite many attempts to establish a musical career for himself, he did not meet with much comprehension from his contemporaries. During Berwald’s lifetime, the Sinfonie sérieuse was the only one of his four symphonies to be performed, and it was not a success.
“There were plenty of listeners who told Berwald he belonged in a madhouse. Just a year before he died, he became the professor of composition at the Royal Academy of music in Stockholm. He left behind a brief textbook, something like a manual for novice composers. According to him, all young composers have to ask themselves some basic questions. Is what I have just composed technically perfect? Is it absolutely unique? If not, into the fire with it… Berwald was simply a radical, and such people have difficult making headway”, says his leading advocate, the Swedish-American conductor Herbert Blomstedt, adding that the music of the composer he admires is above all original. Blomstedt attributes the prominent role of brass instruments in Berwald’s music to the symbolic role of horns in Viking culture, and he ascribes the musical surprises to the composer’s brilliance.
For the occasion of the 230th anniversary of Berwald’s birth, his Third Symphony is accompanied by Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony, sometimes called the “English Symphony” because of its place of publication, although it was written in 1889 at the composer’s summer home in the village Vysoká near Příbram.
“The concert went wonderfully, perhaps even as never before. After the first movement, everyone was applauding, after the second even more, and after the third it was so loud that I had to turn around several times and thank the audience, but after the finale there was a real tempest of applause from the public in the hall and in the balconies, from the orchestra itself, and even the people seated around the organ behind the orchestra were applauding so much that it was unbearable, and I was called up to the stage several times—in brief, it was so lovely and sincere, just like at premieres at home in Prague”, wrote Dvořák about the first British performance of the Eighth on 24 April 1890. Well, so much for worrying about applauding between the movements of a symphony.
Performers
Herbert Blomstedt conductor
“Noble, enchanting, sober, modest.” Music critics and orchestral players around the world have used these words to describe the legendary conductor Herbert Blomstedt, widening the usual vocabulary used in connection with most conductors. However, the fact that this contradicts the usual cliches in many ways does not mean that Blomstedt lacks the strength and ability to assert his clearly defined musical intentions. Anyone experiencing this conductor’s rehearsals in person, witnessing how much he concentrates on expressing the music’s very essence and its facts and circumstances, and encountering his tenacity in getting his aesthetic ideas realised, will probably be surprised by how few despotic measures are required to attain that goal. Herbert Blomstedt has always been the kind of artist whose professional competence and natural authority render any further justification superfluous. His work as a conductor is inseparably bound up with his religious and humane ethos, and his interpretations embody a combination of great fidelity to the score with analytical precision and a soulfulness that brings the music to life. During a career spanning more than 60 years, in the course of which he has stood before all of the world’s leading orchestras, this legendary conductor has earned the boundless respect of the music world.
He was born in the USA to Swedish parents who soon moved back to Sweden. Being drawn to music from his youth, he often played music and sang at home. He also admits that a major stimulus for his further musical development was the opening of a new concert hall in Gothenburg, where his family was living at the time. “I wanted to buy a season subscription, but I had to earn the money by selling newspapers. I got ten cents for every copy I sold, and a season subscription cost 42 Swedish crowns. So I had a lot of work to do to earn that much”, he recalls. Next he studied violin, conducting, and musicology at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, at Uppsala University, in Basil, in New York, and in Darmstadt.
He first came to greater international attention in 1953, when he won the Koussevitzky Prize. He made his conducting debut with the Stockholm orchestra the following year, followed by victory at the conducting competition in Salzburg. Then he served as the chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic, radio symphony orchestras of Sweden and Denmark, and the Staatskapelle Dresden. Later, he became the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, the chief conductor of the NDR Symphony Orchestra, and the music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Many of those orchestras have also given him the title of conductor laureate, and since 2019 he has been an honorary member of the Vienna Philharmonic. Besides holding several honorary doctorates and Germany’s Great Cross of Merit with Star, he has been elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
Even at an advanced age, his artistic zeal is undiminished because, as he himself says, natural curiosity is still keeping him young. Even at the age of 97, he continues to conduct the world’s greatest orchestras. He was last in Prague in 2021, when he appeared at the Rudolfinum for a Dvořák Prague Festival programme of Schubert and Bruckner with the Vienna Philharmonic.
Compositions
Franz Berwald
Symphony No. 3 in C major “Sinfonie Singulière”
Antonín Dvořák
Symphony No. 8 in G Major, Op. 88