Tribute to Luboš Fišer

“Something should happen in a concert. I don’t know what. But, every time, I’m expecting a miracle. I’m not very humble about this!” says Prague Spring Artist-in-Residence 2025, Moldovan-Austrian-Swiss violinist and performer Patricia Kopatchinskaja. The Guardian newspaper described what she’s like on stage, referring to her as “a coiled spring that could unwind in any direction”. PatKop, the nickname Kopatchinskaja gives herself, astonishes her audiences, not only when she walks onstage barefoot, but also with her imaginative, almost fanciful performances, such as Everyday Non-sense, Dies Irae, a response to the climate crisis and displacement, Bye-Bye Beethoven, Kafka Fragments and the Neo-Dadaist opera production Vergeigt. The recording of her own original project Death and the Maiden won a prestigious Grammy award in 2016. The exceptional talent of this artist is also reflected in numerous residencies at such institutions as London’s Southbank Centre and Barbican Centre, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, and the Elbphilharmonie, and in her collaboration with some of the world’s finest orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam and the Berlin Philharmonic, where she was Artist-in-Residence and appeared with them alongside Chief Conductors Sir Simon Rattle and Kirill Petrenko. Not only is Kopatchinskaja a violinist, singer, actress, and professional composer, but she has also become an assiduous and highly successful promoter of contemporary music since, as she states herself: “Of course, you read today’s (and not yesterday’s) papers.” She works with composers such as György Kurtág, Michel van der Aa, Márton Illés, Thomas Larcher and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and she is also Artistic Partner of the SWR Experimental Studio, one of the most important international research centres in the field of electronic music.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja was given her first violin at the age of six, while the family were still in her native Moldova. When she was twelve years old they all emigrated to Vienna where, at 17, she was accepted to the University of Music and Performing Arts. At the age of twenty-one she received a scholarship to study at the Hochschule der Künste in the Swiss city of Bern, which ultimately became her second home. Her international career sky-rocketed when she won the prestigious Credit Suisse Young Artist Award in 2002. “Patricia doesn’t believe that music has to be beautiful – perhaps this is one of the things that makes her controversial – she seems to believe that music is a representation of the realities of life – from fantasy to brutality,” wrote American violinist Anthea Kreston on the slippedisc.com website. “I don’t want people sipping beer while they’re listening to Shostakovich. I want people to feel real pain, I want them to succumb to their imagination. I want to delve deeper into their souls,” Kopatchinskaja herself adds. Her three contrasting programmes at the Prague Spring, during which the music of outstanding Czech composer Luboš Fišer plays an intriguing role, will certainly appeal to anyone who’s looking to experience something far from the ordinary.

“The evening dedicated to Luboš Fišer will perhaps mean the most to me, since I think he is too little known and deserves much more recognition,” says Patricia Kopatchinskaja of her third concert during her Prague Spring residency. Appearing together in the Rudolfinum with her concert partner, Finnish pianist Joonas Ahonen, she will present three works by a Czech composer who is known to the general public particularly for his memorable scores for what are now Czech film classics. In the second half of the programme you will hear the last, tenth sonata for violin and piano by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), which the Bonn native wrote for the great French violinist Pierre Rode.

The Black Barons, Forbidden Dreams, The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians, The Golden Eels, Adele’s Dinner, A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova or the famous motif of the magic ring from the series Arabela. This is just a modest list of the film and television music created by Czech composer Luboš Fišer (1935–1999). Apart from his film scores, for which he won a number of important awards, including a Prix d’Italia and two Czech Lions, Fišer was also a leading Czech classical composer of the latter half of the 20^th century, whose oeuvre is marked by strong expressivity and unique artistry. We could mention Fifteen Pages after Dürer’s Apocalypse, which won a Prague Spring competition award in 1965 and also the UNESCO prize in 1966; the television production of the opera Eternal Faust, which took away the top prize at a television festival in Salzburg in 1986; or indeed his compositions for violin: eleven in total, these works are considered gems of the 20^th century Czech violin repertoire.

Luboš Fišer wrote Sonata for Violin Solo in 1981 in memory of the victims of the Terezín ghetto. The piece conveys incredible emotional power, even though neither the composer nor members of his family were ever interned there. Twenty years previously he wrote his Sonata for Violin and Piano “Hands”. Luboš Fišer took the title of this stirring piece with its almost apocalyptic ending from a poem by Otokar Březina. “In a blinding white light the earth was laid out before our eyes like an opened book of songs. And so we sang…” – these are the opening lines of the Symbolist’s verse entitled Ruce [Hands]. Further along we read: “Unceasing waves of pain, courage, madness, lust, delusion, and love course through our bodies. And in the blast of that wind, our senses turning inward, we feel how that chain of ours, grasped by the hands of higher beings, is enveloped by a new chain into all the stellar fields that circumscribe the planet.” The last work by Fišer on the programme dates roughly from the same period – the third of eight piano sonatas, which likewise assume a key position in the composer’s musical legacy.

Joonas Ahonen is familiar to festival audiences primarily as the pianist in Klangforum Wien, of which he was a member for twelve years, and with whom he appeared in Gÿorgy Ligeti’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Holešovice. He feels just at home with the 20^th and 21^st century repertoire as he does with the music of Romanticism and Classicism, which he also performs on the fortepiano. In 2023 he became professor of piano at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne, taking over from Pierre-Laurent Aimard. In 2024 he was appointed Artistic Director of Finland’s Avanti! Chamber Orchestra, which specialises in contemporary music. He has worked with Patricia Kopatchinskaja over an extensive period and together they have built up a wonderful partnership, performing in such venues as Teatro alla Scala, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, Toppan Hall in Tokyo, and the prestigious Gstaad Menuhin Festival in Switzerland. Their joint album Le monde selon George Antheil (The World According to George Antheil) was described by Britain’s Gramophone magazine as “a miracle”.