The programme brings together the music of two great friends, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, and opens with the energetic Cyrano de Bergerac overture by Johan Wagenaar, a Dutch composer whose style recalls the grand Romantic scores of Richard Strauss.

Making his Prague Spring debut on the podium will be the thirty-six-year-old conductor Lahav Shani, who developed artistically under the wing of the legendary Daniel Barenboim. Joining him in writing his first Prague Spring chapter will be one of today’s most outstanding musical talents, the Austrian pianist Lukas Sternath. At just twenty-five, the winner of the ARD International Music Competition in Munich and an ECHO Rising Star 2024, he has, in the past three years, made debuts with the Vienna Philharmonic, at the Salzburg Festival and the BBC Proms, as well as at London’s Wigmore Hall and Leipzig’s Gewandhaus. A pianist who combines remarkable lyricism with youthful temperament and superb technique, he will perform Robert Schumann’s beautiful (and only) Piano Concerto, into which the composer wove the name of his great love, Clara Schumann.

If you are a lover of grand gestures and Romantic scores, reserve the evening of 1 June for the Prague Spring. We will tell you stories filled with tenderness, joy, love – and, above all, happy endings.

Filmed last year to mark the 80th Prague Spring Festival, this nearly hour-long documentary features contributions from artists such as Semyon Bychkov, Václav Hudeček, Jan Klusák, Jiří Chvála and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, tracing both the festival’s eighty-year history and its present day. Through archival footage, viewers will also encounter figures including Herbert von Karajan, Charles Munch, Rafael Kubelík and Rudolf Firkušný. The documentary is a co-production of the Prague Spring Festival, Czech Television and innogy Česká republika.

Photo: Herbert von Karajan and Karel Ančerl at the Prague Spring Festival in 1963. Photo: Václav Chochola / © B&M Chochola Archive

“I must have been about two and a half. We were living in a small house near Seoul and were very poor. My father, a Presbyterian pastor, bought an upright piano for church services. I remember it being brought into the house. I opened the lid and pressed a few keys. The sound struck me immediately. It was like crystal, clear and smooth like silk,” recalls Unsuk Chin of her first encounter with music. Something of that moment seems to have remained in her work to this day – reflections of her dreams, her fascination with astronomy, with infinity…

If you, too, would like to be “struck by sound” and come closer to one of the brightest stars of contemporary classical music, join us at Prague Offspring on 29 and 30 May at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. Hear the unheard-of. It will be an unforgettable experience!