Czech Philharmonic • Janine Jansen
Reviews say there is no surer way to bring a repertoire piece to life than a Janine Jansen performance. Conductor Jakub Hrůša sets out to prove that what has once been written should not remain frozen as if in a display case. Then the composer Martin Smolka describes his job as reworking old forms in an idiosyncratic manner.
Programme
Josef Suk
Dramatic Overture, Op. 4
Ludwig van Beethoven
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61
Martin Smolka
Melancholia is Sitting and Looking Elsewhere (world premiere, commissioned by the Czech Philharmonic)
Richard Strauss
Der Rosenkavalier, suite from the opera, Op. 59
Performers
Janine Jansen violin
Jakub Hrůša conductor
Czech Philharmonic
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Jakub Hrůša calls performing the music of Josef Suk his perennial passion and a pleasurable duty. In the 2026/2027 season with the Czech Philharmonic, he finishes the long-term project of recording Suk’s complete orchestral works with his Dramatic Overture. In search of contrast, the conductor will open the concert with that work.
Beethoven’s Violin Concerto opened the second half of a concert on the day before Christmas Eve in 1806 at the Theater an der Wien. Because the work was finished at the last moment, the violin virtuoso Franz Clement supposedly had to play it without having prepared properly, but after the premiere, a critic wrote about the “energy and sureness with which the soloist made the instrument into his slave”. Nonetheless, only long after its composer’s death did the concerto found popularity, following an 1844 performance by the 12-year-old violinist Joseph Joachim with Beethoven’s admirer Felix Mendelssohn conducting.
Martin Smolka’s Melancholy Sits and Looks Elsewhere brings us to the present. He says that music is a “clumsy, miserable narrator of extramusical content”, and that a composer “lacks any proof that the music contains the meanings mentioned in the title”, yet Smolka does not give up on using textual components. On the basis of a libretto by Jaroslav Dušek, he composed Nagano, an opera in three periods and an overtime about the Czech national ice hockey team’s historic Olympic victory, and he has written other operas based on motifs from a fairy tale by Jan Werich or as a tribute to Umberto Eco; programme notes are one of his favourite genres. He has even written a poem about his creative processes, and we sill use it to invite listeners to a concert featuring a diverse programme ending with Richard Strauss:
How to Place Tones
Here and there a tone
here and there a ton of tones
here and there a tone
here and there a ton of tones
here and there a thinner tone
here and there a thicker tone
here and there
there and here
music
with tones
Performers
Janine Jansen violin
Janine Jansen was born to a Dutch family. Her father, an organist, pianist, and harpsichord player, and her mother, a singer, taught music to all their children from an early age. Little Janine sang in the church choir and began playing the violin at age six under the guidance of the famed pedagogue Coosje Wijzenbeek and making music with her father and brothers. “There was no escaping music at home; life without it was unthinkable,” she recalls. She also witnessed the rehearsals of early music ensembles because some of the biggest names in the field of historically informed interpretation in those days were among her family’s friends, and that had such an influence on her that there was even a time when she played with a Baroque bow and gut strings. Ultimately, however, she decided to go the “traditional” route and to pay her respects to historically informed interpretation in other ways (like by the style of her phrasing), and that gives her playing a personal touch.
She made her debut at Amsterdam’s famed Concertgebouw at age 15, and even the sudden death of Philippe Hirschhorn, her teacher at the time, could not stop her rise to fame. Another teacher, Boris Belkin, followed, and shortly after her 20th birthday, she launched her international career and began making recordings on the Decca Classics label. Since her Vivaldi recording, which broke sales records, she has become famous all around the world.
For years now, top musical ensembles have been vying for her attention. In March 2024 at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the inaugural Janine Jansen Bach Festival will take place, at which the violin superstar will play roles in planning the programmes and performing. Besides the traditional repertoire, this season also features contemporary music including the double concerto Distans by the English composer Sally Beamish and the world premiere of a violin concerto by Britta Byström. There is also plenty of touring squeezed into her busy schedule. The longest tour is to the Far East with the Oslo Philharmonic and Klaus Mäkelä, but there will be plenty of appearances in Europe as well. One tour includes an appearance with the London Symphony Orchestra led by Sir Antonio Pappano, with whom she has a long history of professional friendship.
Under his baton, Janine Jansen has make recordings including works by Brahms and Bartók, but they came into even closer contact when she made her latest CD titled “12 Stradivari”, a recording that the journal Gramophone even called “a beautiful testament to her very special musical friendship with Pappano”. Jansen came up with the truly original idea of creating a kind of study of twelve Stradivarius violins, presenting them in the repertoire for which those instruments were the inspiration, the goal being to let the outstanding qualities of each instrument come to the fore. And she invited none other than her “old friend” Pappano to accompany her at the piano.
Besides Pappano, Jansen also works closely with the pianist Denis Kozhukhin, with whom she will be appearing in December at Wigmore Hall as the season’s artist-in-residence, and she is playing in a trio established with Martha Argerich and Mischa Maisky. She already got a taste of chamber music at home as a child, and her teacher Coosje Wijzenbeek strongly fostered that interest. Chamber music has had an indispensable place in her career, as is also shown by the International Chamber Music Festival Utrecht, which has been under her artistic supervision from its founding until what is now its 20th season.
Jakub Hrůša principal guest conductor
Born in the Czech Republic, Jakub Hrůša is Chief Conductor of the Bamberg Symphony, Music Director Designate of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden (Music Director from 2025), and Principal Guest Conductor of the Czech Philharmonic. He was also formerly Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra.
He is a frequent guest with the world’s greatest orchestras, including the Vienna, Berlin, Munich and New York Philharmonics; Bavarian Radio, NHK, Chicago and Boston Symphonies; Leipzig Gewandhaus, Lucerne Festival, Royal Concertgebouw, Mahler Chamber and The Cleveland Orchestras; Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and Tonhalle Orchester Zürich. He has led opera productions for the Salzburg Festival (Káťa Kabanová with the Vienna Philharmonic in 2022), Vienna State Opera, Royal Opera House, and Opéra National de Paris. He has also been a regular guest with Glyndebourne Festival and served as Music Director of Glyndebourne On Tour for three years.
His relationships with leading vocal and instrumental soloists have included collaborations in recent seasons with Daniil Trifonov, Mitsuko Uchida, Hélène Grimaud, Behzod Abduraimov, Anne Sofie Mutter, Lisa Batiashvili, Joshua Bell, Yefim Bronfman, Rudolf Buchbinder, Gautier Capuçon, Julia Fischer, Sol Gabetta, Hilary Hahn, Janine Jansen, Karita Mattila, Leonidas Kavakos, Lang Lang, Josef Špaček, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Yuja Wang, Frank Peter Zimmermann, Alisa Weilerstein and others.
As a recording artist, Jakub Hrůša has received numerous awards and nominations for his discography. Most recently, he received the Opus Klassik Conductor of the Year 2023 prize and the ICMA prize for Symphonic Music for his recording of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, and the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik for his recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, both with Bamberg Symphony. In 2021, his disc of Martinů and Bartók violin concertos with Bamberg Symphony and Frank Peter Zimmermann was nominated for BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone awards, and his recording of the Dvořák Violin Concerto with the Bavarian Radio Symphony and Augustin Hadelich was nominated for a Grammy Award.
Jakub Hrůša studied at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where his teachers included Jiří Bělohlávek. He is President of the International Martinů Circle and The Dvořák Society. He was the inaugural recipient of the Sir Charles Mackerras Prize, and in 2020 was awarded both the Antonín Dvořák Prize by the Czech Republic’s Academy of Classical Music, and – together with Bamberg Symphony – the Bavarian State Prize for Music.
Compositions
Josef Suk
Dramatic Overture, Op. 4
Ludwig van Beethoven
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61
The beginning of the new century was a major turning point in the life of Ludwig van Beethoven. While war was raging Europe because of the French Revolution, the composer was undergoing a deep personal crisis. Since about 1798 his hearing had been worsening gradually, and despite the efforts of physicians, this ultimately led to total deafness. This was an especially crushing blow for Beethoven, who had been earning a living mainly as a piano virtuoso since moving from his birthplace Bonn to Vienna. Consumed by his own problems, in April 1802 he moved to a quiet settlement on the outskirts of Vienna in the hope that his health would improve. Unfortunately, that did not occur. Beethoven was convinced that his worsening deafness portended the approaching end of his life. That autumn he wrote what we know as the Heiligenstadt Testament. In this moving letter that he wrote to his brothers but never sent, at just 32 years of age, Beethoven confesses that his worsening health has brought him suffering, and also admits that he had contemplated suicide. Ultimately, however, the composer rejected such thoughts, reconciled himself to his fate, and with growing determination fully devoted himself to a higher calling. In the years that followed, Beethoven gave himself over entirely to composing and began a new chapter of his artistic career, which his biographers have called his “heroic period”.
This is when he wrote his great Fifth Symphony as well as the Eroica and the Pastoral, the piano sonata known as the Apassionata, the first version of the opera Fidelio, and the Violin Concerto in D major. The composer wrote his only concerto for that instrument on commission for Franz Clement, the talented violinist, composer, and conductor at the Theater an der Wien. The premiere took place on 23 December 1806, and Beethoven had supposedly only finished the score a few days beforehand. It appears that the artistic quality of the premiere suffered because of insufficient rehearsal time. Although the audience gave the new work a cordial reception, the music critics were more reserved, and apart from a handful of performances the concerto was largely forgotten for another 38 years. The man behind its rediscovery in 1844 was the violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim, at the time just 14 years old, who performed it with great success at his London debut. Since then, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto has won a place in the standard repertoire as one of the pillars of the violin literature alongside the concertos of Brahms, Bruch, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky.
The Violin Concerto in D major makes demands of the highest order on the performer. The three-movement work in the classical concerto mould is imbued with a lyrical mood that is unusual in comparison with Beethoven’s other works. Here, the heroism we noted above, as found for example in the Eroica or the piano concertos, yields to the composer’s admiration for pastoral motifs. In this regard, the middle movement (Larghetto) is especially remarkable. Beethoven used this very slow tempo indication only twice in his orchestral works. The first time was in his Second Symphony, which he completed while staying in Heiligenstadt. The solo violin part lies mostly in the very high register, and the melodic material is built from simple scales and arpeggios, while the orchestra serves mostly as a harmonic anchor, and the music’s pulse nearly comes to a halt in places. The overall effect is one of an intimate confession, but in the final bars of the movement, the mood is interrupted by a playfully virtuosic motif announcing the following Rondo.
The protagonist of this evening’s concert, Lisa Batiashvili, first played Beethoven’s concerto at age 18, and she still regards it as an exceptional work: “It is heavenly music that carries us away to another world. Beethoven wrote a work that is incredibly virtuosic, but one must still play it as lightly as possible. Especially in the last movement, you have to show what you are capable of, but at the same time you have the feeling that it is you who must serve the music, and not the other way around.”
Martin Smolka
Melancholy Sits and Looks Elsewhere
Richard Strauss
Der Rosenkavalier, Op. 59, suite from the opera
Nejslavnější ze svých oper, Růžového kavalíra, napsal Strauss (v roce 1913) jako velkou valčíkovou fantazii, nedbaje, že tím jaksi porušuje hudebně historické zařazení děje, který se odehrává ve Vídni za Marie Terezie. Nicméně celá opera je vlastně kritikou velkoměstského elegantně poživačného životního stylu, jehož hudebním výrazem je nejpřesvědčivěji právě vídeňský valčík Straussových jmenovců. V jejich rukou se stal oblíbený tanec vídeňských dupáren poetickou koncertní skladbou, hudebním symbolem císařské Vídně devatenáctého století; ve dvacátém ho pak Richard Strauss vybavil marnotratnými prostředky své kompoziční brilance a orchestračního umění a učinil ho vůdčí hudební ideou celé opery. A také ovšem výsostnou skladbou symfonickou, když z její hudby sestavil dva Valčíkové sledy (1934 a 1944).
Aranžmá Suity z Růžového kavalíra (1944) však podle všeho není jeho dílem, nýbrž dirigenta Artura Rodzińského, který také dirigoval její premiéru s Newyorskou filharmonií. Počínajíc orchestrálním úvodem představuje skladba v jednom proudu sled klíčových scén a charakteristiku jednotlivých postav a jejich vztahů; zpěvní party nahrazuje nástrojovými (duet mladé dvojice hobojem a lesním rohem). Dovedena k ekstatickému vyvrcholení pokračuje a končí samozřejmě jedním z četných valčíků.