Barbara Hannigan – Artist-in-Residence – Prague Spring

Masterclass – Barbara Hannigan

koubova@festival.cz — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 10:39:46 +0000

This masterclass is aimed at students of singing and is not limited to any specific repertoire. Active participation is free of charge. All those interested in taking part may register via the email address masterclass@festival.cz by sending us their current CV not later than 31 March 2026.

Artist-in-Residence of the Prague Spring 2026 Barbara Hannigan is one of the most original figures in the sphere of classical music. With her typical fearlessness she sings and conducts, she inspires the finest contemporary composers in their endeavours, and she creates unique projects which go far beyond the customary concert experience. Born in Canada, she has performed the premieres of more than one hundred works. She collaborates with some of the world’s most distinguished conductors and orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic. Her exceptional artistic achievements likewise include a number of prestigious awards, among them a Grammy Award, the title Artist of the Year from Gramophone magazine, and the Polar Music Prize 2025, a Swedish international award established by music publisher and manager of ABBA Stig Anderson, which she won together with jazzman Herbie Hancock and the rock band Queen. Also in 2025 she earned the title Artist of the Year at the Musical America Awards.

Barbara Hannigan has been focusing her attention on the young generation of artists for several years. In 2017 she established the mentoring programme Equilibrium Young Artists and in 2020 the platform Momentum: our future, now. Both initiatives offer young professional musicians artistic guidance and interesting performance opportunities. Barbara Hannigan is also Reinbert de Leeuw Professor of Music at the Royal Academy of Music in London and Creative Associate at the Juilliard School in New York.

Barbara Hannigan’s residency at the Prague Spring 2026
20/5 Barbara Hannigan & Bertrand Chamayou
24/5 Barbara Hannigan & Belcea Quartet
26/5 Barbara Hannigan – La Voix humaine
2/6 Barbara Hannigan & Czech Philharmonic

Barbara Hannigan © Luciano Romano

Barbara Hannigan & Bertrand Chamayou

Kateřina Koutná — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:05:59 +0000

Artist-in-Residence of the Prague Spring 2026 Barbara Hannigan is one of the most original figures in the sphere of classical music. With her typical courage and determination she sings and also conducts, she inspires the finest contemporary composers in their endeavours, and she creates unique projects which go far beyond the customary concert experience. Born in Canada, she has performed the premieres of more than one hundred works. She collaborates with some of the world’s most distinguished conductors and orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic. She is Principal Guest Conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, she holds the positions of Associate Artist of the London Symphony Orchestra and the Première Artiste Invitée of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and in the autumn of 2026 she will take up her post as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Her exceptional artistic achievements are moreover reflected in a number of prestigious awards, among them a Grammy Award, the title Artist of the Year from Gramophone magazine, and the Polar Music Prize 2025, a Swedish international award established by music publisher and manager of ABBA Stig Anderson, which she won together with jazzman Herbie Hancock and the rock band Queen. Her Prague Spring residency will consist of four concerts.

Barbara Hannigan & Bertrand Chamayou © Luciano Romano

The first concert will be a joint recital given by soprano Barbara Hannigan and superb French pianist Bertrand Chamayou. “After both European and North American tours I am thrilled to be able to introduce the Czech audience to this very spiritual programme,” says Barbara Hannigan. Prague concertgoers will thus finally be able to hear the utterly unique cycle Jumalattaret by American composer and multi-instrumentalist John Zorn (*1953). These songs, originating in 2012 as a musical setting of fragments from the Finnish national epic Kalevala, were long considered unsingable. Here the singer is reincarnated into Finnish pagan goddesses; “each measure is a minefield of intonation and technique” (The New York Times). This work, whose performance actually takes your breath away, is fascinating for the incredible vocal range it requires, from incredibly high top notes to throat-singing, ethereal humming, whispering, laughter and a voice that vibrates like birdsong. “It’s one of those pieces that was life-changing,” Barbara Hannigan declared of Jumalattaret. “You’ve got to tame the wild horse and get a saddle on it,” she said. “This piece took a lot for me to be able to do that.” Jumalattaret is such an astounding work that to hear it performed live by the Hannigan – Chamayou duo will undoubtedly be one of the highlights of the Prague Spring 2026. Moreover, not only will this be the first performance of Jumalattaret in the Czech Republic, but also the Prague Spring debut of Barbara Hannigan.

The recital programme will open with Chants de terre et de ciel (Songs of Earth and Heaven) by Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992), which this classic of 20th century French music wrote to his own texts. The cycle originated in 1938, inspired by the joyous birth of the composer’s son Pascal, to whom two of the six songs are dedicated. “The superb projection of Hannigan’s voice and the rainbow of colours in Chamayou’s piano lay bare the sexual desire and religious fervour prevalent in Messiaen’s early works,” wrote Britain’s The Guardian in a review of their joint recording of the songs. The two artists have already performed Chants de terre et de ciel in Berlin, Paris, New York, Brussels and other major world venues, and it’s wonderful that Prague listeners will have the opportunity to hear the cycle as well.

Barbara Hannigan & Bertrand Chamayou © Co Merz

Creating a bridge between these two song cycles, Bertrand Chamayou will perform two works for solo piano by Russian musical mystic Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872–1915). The piece Poème-nocturne Op. 61 from 1912 is reminiscent of a fleeting image, of a state between waking and sleeping. Upon writing it Scriabin declared: “I at last managed to transcend the realm of human emotion.” The second composition entitled Vers la flamme Op. 72 (Towards the flame) is probably the best known piano work from the closing period of his life. According to legendary pianist and leading performer of Scriabin’s oeuvre Vladimir Horowitz, the title reflects the composer’s conviction that a constant accumulation of heat would ultimately cause the fiery destruction of the world. This notion is also suggested by the extreme technical difficulty towards the end of the piece, for whose performance even Vladimir Horowitz had to take off his jacket. Bertrand Chamayou will be another of its sovereign exponents. A regular guest at the most prestigious concerts halls, including the Philharmonie de Paris, London’s Wigmore Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and the Salzburg and Lucerne festivals, he returns to the Prague Spring after an absence of four years. His impressive résumé reveals collaboration with first-rate world orchestras and conductors, such as Pierre Boulez, Sir Neville Marriner, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Herbert Blomstedt, Andris Nelsons and Sir Antonio Pappano. The titles in his fascinating discography have earned various distinctions, among them “Recording of the Year 2019“ from Gramophone magazine and the ECHO Klassik Award. Chamayou is also the only artist to have received the coveted French accolade Victoires de la Musique Classique on five occasions.

Barbara Hannigan’s debut at the Prague Spring in collaboration with Bertrand Chamayou offers everything a listener could wish for: virtuosity, spiritual depth, mystery. And it’ll be a superb start to Barbara Hannigan’s remarkable Prague Spring artistic residency.

Barbara Hannigan & Bertrand Chamayou © Luciano Romano

Listen to a selection from the programme

Barbara Hannigan & Belcea Quartet

Kateřina Koutná — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:05:57 +0000

The second project of her artistic residency at the Prague Spring is also the festival debut of the Belcea Quartet. The string quartet, which was formed in 1994 at the Royal College of Music in London, is today one of the world’s most highly respected chamber ensembles. They regularly appear in London’s Wigmore Hall, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, New York’s Carnegie Hall and Vienna’s Konzerthaus. In the years 2017–2020 the quartet was Ensemble-in-Residence at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin. The German daily Hamburger Abendblatt wrote that “the Belcea Quartet plays concerts for eternity.”

Barbara Hannigan © Marco Borggreve

The first half of the concert will feature the Belcea Quartet, which is renowned for its ability to combine flawless unity of sound and intonation with a supremely natural expression. The purely Central European programme will open with Five Movements Op. 5 by Anton Webern (1883–1945), an exceptional work which, more than a century after it was written, continues to impact audiences with its boldness, concentration of expression and enchanting eloquence. The five musical miniatures (the fourth part lasts only a few seconds) for string quartet from 1909 is a prime example of Webern’s ability to link up individual musical elements to form a crystal-clear single entity. A pioneer of so-called Klangfarbenmelodie, he creates new worlds of sound, among others, by placing all manner of technical demands on the players with the aim of exploiting the sound of the instruments and bringing out the maximum that they are capable of. The result is a composition that combines musical asceticism with elegance of line and colour, and moments of utmost tenderness with extreme intensity of sound. Webern’s specific world of sound is followed by the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), namely one of his loveliest string quartets known as “Dissonance” for its unusual harmonic introduction. The piece is part of a collection of six quartets which the composer wrote between the years 1782–1785 and dedicated to Joseph Haydn.

In the second half of the concert the Belcea Quartet will be joined by Barbara Hannigan. They will first present the cycle Melancholie Op. 13 by German composer Paul Hindemith (1895–1963), written to verse by Christian Morgenstern. “Hindemith’s Melancholie is a score I have carried around for many years, waiting for the right moment to explore it, ever since my beloved colleague Reinbert de Leeuw told me about it,” says Hannigan, referring to the late Dutch conductor and pianist, who was her music partner for many years. “Though rarely performed, this work is heartfelt and heartbreaking. […] It’s a gem of a piece,” Hannigan adds.

“I feel air from another planet,” wrote German Symbolist poet Stefan George in a poem set to music by Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) in String Quartet No. 2 Op. 10, which features a soprano solo in the last two movements. It was as if George were articulating a thought that Schoenberg was trying to convey in his music for the very first time – namely the desire for new, unbridled expression. Schoenberg wrote the work during an emotional time in his life, when his wife Mathilde was conducting an affair with the artist Richard Gerstl, which culminated in the latter’s suicide. The composer, himself a visual artist, also began increasingly to shape his aesthetic visions in his paintings, through which he aligned himself with the Expressionist movement. His departure from late Romantic musical thinking is symbolically reflected in the quartet via a quotation of the folk song O du lieber Augustin, alles ist hin (Oh, you dear Augustin, all is lost). “It feels like that cool, soothing, extraterrestrial breeze is gently urging us away from what we knew and loved, including harmony,” states Barbara Hannigan, poetically commenting on the piece. Schoenberg’s quartet concludes a programme of compositions which, in their day, heralded new possibilities of musical expression. Works by four visionaries of music history.

Belcea Quartet © Maurice Haas

Listen to a selection from the programme performed by Barbara Hannigan with the Emerson String Quartet

Barbara Hannigan & Czech Philharmonic

Anežka Kochová — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:05:36 +0000

Barbara Hannigan © Marco Borggreve

“My second Prague Spring concert with the Czech Philharmonic features works very dear to me: Haydn’s Farewell Symphony with its tender finish, and in the second half we have another tone poem for strings, Schoenberg’s early work Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), in which a woman makes a heartbreaking confession to the love of her life. We follow this with Gershwin’s Girl Crazy Suite, which one might feel is a strange pairing (and, indeed, the reality that the two composers were friends and even tennis partners does seem absurd to some) but here we have two great composers dealing with rich harmony and the emotions of romantic love,” states Barbara Hannigan. In any case, as her residency draws to a close the artist invites us on an adventure, which she will open with the now legendary piece entitled The Unanswered Question by American musical visionary Charles Ives (1874–1954). The founder of the Ives & Myrick Insurance Company, he was the first to devise ways of structuring life-insurance packages that laid the foundations for modern estate planning. He only composed at weekends and on the train to work; although his music was decades ahead of its time, his work as a composer was largely ignored during his lifetime. To illustrate this point, we might mention the fact that, in 1947, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony, a work he had written forty years earlier. The Unanswered Question, a mystical work from the year 1908, is sometimes described as programme music, yet it would be more fitting to speak of philosophy transferred to music. In the introduction to the piece the composer writes that he is exploring “The Perennial Question of Existence”. Barely six minutes long, the work is discernibly structured into three independent layers: the first is created by the solo trumpet, the second by four flutes, and the third by the strings, which form some kind of serene background. The trumpet solo poses the question, while the four flutes, representing humanity, try to find an answer – at first softly, but later – as if frustrated that it cannot be found – growing increasingly more aggressive and agitated. Finally the trumpet asks the question one last time… And the response is an eloquent silence.

Barbara Hannigan © Marco Borggreve

The next piece on the programme – Symphony No. 45 “Farewell” by Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) also has a hidden subtext. Haydn wrote it at the summer residence of his patron, Nikolaus I, Prince Esterházy, who had stayed at the palace longer than expected, together with all his orchestral musicians and retinue. Unhappy that they could not return to their families, the musicians looked to their Kapellmeister for help, and the composer, instead of making a direct appeal to the prince, put his request into the music of the symphony: during the final movement each musician gradually stopped playing, extinguished the candle on his music stand and left the room, until only the concertmaster and Haydn himself remained on the podium. Esterházy apparently understood the message and his entire court, including the musicians, returned to Vienna shortly after the performance of the work. Today this symphony offers a wonderful and enjoyable opportunity for the orchestral players to demonstrate their acting skills as well.

What did the founder of the Second Viennese School and leading composer of atonal music Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and George Gershwin (1898–1937), one of the greatest hitmakers of last century, have in common? More than it would seem. After Schoenberg found refuge in California, both composers began to meet up regularly and a mutual respect grew into a friendship cemented by their shared love of tennis and fine art. Gershwin even painted Schoenberg’s portrait. When the former suddenly died from a brain tumour shortly afterwards, Schoenberg paid a moving tribute to his friend during a radio broadcast. “George Gershwin was one of these rare kind of musicians to whom music is not a matter of more or less ability. Music, to him, was the air he breathed, the food which nourished him, the drink that refreshed him. Music was what made him feel and music was the feeling he expressed. Directness of this kind is given only to great men.” Barbara Hannigan decided to combine their oeuvre in the latter half of the concert. First we will hear the piece for strings Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Schoenberg’s lyrical work strongly influenced by Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and inspired by the poem of the same name by Richard Dehmel from the collection Weib und Welt (Woman and World). The erotic, symbolist, decadent nature of Dehmel’s verse had a fundamental influence on Schoenberg’s work for a number of years. “It was this poetry that first enticed me to seek a new tone in lyricism,” he told Dehmel in one of his letters. The programme will culminate in a performance of the spectacular suite from the musical Girl Crazy, featuring Gershwin’s most famous songs I Got Rhythm and Embraceable You, which Barbara Hannigan will sing in her inimitable way at the close of her festival residency, in collaboration with the Czech Philharmonic. v

Česká filharmonie © Václav Hodina

Barbara Hannigan – La Voix humaine

Iva Nevoralova — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:05:33 +0000

We will fully appreciate the artist’s unique talent in the third concert of her festival residency, where she will appear not only as a singer and actress, but also as the conductor of the Czech Philharmonic. “This will be the Czech premiere of my production of Poulenc’s opera La Voix humaine, which involves live video by means of three cameras placed within the orchestra, and a large screen behind the players. The opera, with texts by Jean Cocteau, seems to be the final conversation between a woman and her (ex)lover. But the text constantly returns to the importance the woman places on fantasy, imagination, truth and lies. It becomes clear that this character needs to live in her own version of reality (as do we all…) and her isolation and emotional intensity brings the opera to a heartbreaking finish. I have paired Poulenc’s opera with Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss (1864–1949), in which we see the emotional landscape as the Second World War was coming to its end,” Barbara Hannigan tells us. Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings, completed on 12 April 1945, is a late, immensely personal work by the then 81-year-old composer, sometimes described as Strauss’s epitaph of a German culture destroyed by war. The piece, most likely inspired by Goethe’s poem Niemand wird sich selber kennen (No-one will ever know himself), ends with a quotation of Marcia funebre from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, beneath which, on the final page of his autograph, Strauss wrote the words “In memoriam!”

Speaking into the mouthpiece, Elle says “I love you…” four times, delivering her mantra to her lover, who is leaving her forever. This is the end of the one-act opera La Voix humaine (The Human Voice) written by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) and based on the play of the same name by Jean Cocteau. Cocteau wrote his monodrama in 1928, shortly before being accepted for treatment for his opium addiction; yet it was thirty years – 1958 – before its musical setting saw the light of day. From his own experience Poulenc knew all about the fear, depression and nervous exhaustion that the loss of a loved one can induce. It wasn’t long before the composition of La Voix humaine that he had experienced something similar. “I’m writing an opera,” he told a friend; “you know what it’s about: a woman (me) is making a last telephone call to her lover who is getting married the next day.” He incorporated the role of the unseen and unheard ex-lover into the part played by the orchestra, which mediates what is happening on the other end of the phone. “This one-sided conversation is absolutely full of contradictions, lies, fantasy and desire. What I am most interested in is the power, control, weakness and the ever-changing equilibrium of all of these aspects of Elle. I find myself asking if there even is an ex-lover. What and who really exists within these deep and true emotions of love, loss and loneliness?” wonders Barbara Hannigan, commenting on this fascinating work. Not only will she be performing the only role in this opera, but she will also be conducting the work. “Her physical commitment is total. She plays, lives and inhabits the music as much as her role,” wrote the French magazine Télérama of her singular interpretation of Elle. “Her body and face are remarkably adaptable and expressive. The pirouettes, pranks and emotions follow one another with fluidity. The high points of the work are overwhelming.” Cocteau’s monologue inspired a number of other creations, including the famous film by Pedro Almodóvar Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Soon after its premiere in Paris, Poulenc’s opera conquered Milan’s La Scala and other world venues and today is a rare gem of the 20th century operatic repertoire.

Strauss´ Metamorphosen with Berliner Philharmoniker and Herbert von Karajan

Time & Eternity

Kateřina Koutná — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 21:58:19 +0000

“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 first of the three projects at the Prague Spring 2025 bears the title Time & Eternity. It was conceived in collaboration with the chamber orchestra Camerata Bern, with whom Kopatchinskaja has been associated since 2018 as Artistic Partner. The programme takes listeners on a journey through six centuries of music and, in Kopatchinskaja’s words, was born of “the blood and tears of tortured souls. […] A strangled scream, voices muttering amid a terrified silence, the sounds of war in an improvised cadenza. It is about us, our past and our future.” The musical production, which combines instrumental music, folk singing, the medieval Mass, Bach chorales, a screening and lighting design, originated in 2018 and was published in 2019 by Alpha Classics. “Kopatchinskaja’s playing is daring in her use of extreme dynamics, sometimes down to a spidery whisper,” wrote Gramophone magazine at the time.

The principal works of the programme are Concerto funèbre by Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905–1963), written in 1939 in response to the intensifying Nazi terror in Europe, and Polyptyque by Frank Martin (1890–1974), inspired by six paintings by the Italian artist and founder of the Sienese painting school, Duccio di Buoninsegna, depicting scenes from the Passion of Christ. Martin wrote the concerto for solo violin, unusually combined with two small string orchestras, in 1973 for violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Somewhat hauntingly, Kopatchinskaja further disrupts what is already an extraordinary composition with transcriptions of Bach chorales for string orchestra, through which she alleviates the pain present in Martin’s music. A critic writing for the website musicwebinternational.com described Kopatchinskaja’s performance in these two works, stating: “I haven’t heard these splendid 20^th century scores sound better.”

The evening will begin with Kol Nidre, a piece by American composer and multi-instrumentalist John Zorn (*1953), inspired by the Jewish prayer that opens the Yom Kippur services. A Polish folk singer sings the Jewish song Eliyahu Hanavi (Elijah the Prophet) which, incidentally, is quoted by Karl Amadeus Hartmann in his concerto. Hartmann’s Concerto funèbre also cites the melody of the Czech Hussite hymn Ye who are warriors of God – a gesture through which the composer expressed his compassion and support for the Czechoslovaks, who were betrayed after the signing of the Munich Agreement. An important part of this compellingly constructed musical mosaic is the piece by Luboš Fišer (1935–1999) Crux for violin, timpani and bells, which dates from 1970 and could be seen as a protest against the ongoing Normalisation era in the former CSSR. Luboš Fišer was fascinated by number symbolism, which is reflected in this piece as well. The prime numbers 7 and 11 appear almost continually here (the entire composition is a variation on a theme comprising eleven notes), along with multiples of the number three, which connect the numerical symbolism with spiritual mysticism. “A passionate, challenging and ultimately fascinating ʽconceptʼ album,” was how the prestigious music magazine The Strad described Time & Eternity. You will have the opportunity to hear this exceptional project live in an authentic interpretation from Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the Camerata Bern orchestra, who perform together in the Rudolfinum’s Dvořák Hall on 16 May.

Tribute to Luboš Fišer

Kateřina Koutná — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 17:12:37 +0000

“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.

Pierrot lunaire

Kateřina Koutná — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 16:58:26 +0000

Let’s also take a look at the other three remarkable parts of the programme, where Patricia Kopatchinskaja will assume the role of chamber player: L’Histoire du soldat (Tale of the Soldier) by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) – a parable about a soldier who makes a pact with the devil, agreeing to part with his violin in exchange for a magic book promising untold wealth; Bartók’s popular Contrasts, in which the Prague Spring Artist-in-Residence will perform on a retuned violin; and Jeu from Suite for violin, clarinet and piano by Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), a pioneer in jazz and polytonality in classical music. Inspiration from jazz and folk music is what brings all three works together, even in the case of Béla Bartók (1881–1945), who was commissioned to write Contrasts by jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman. The lyrical episode in the final movement in 13/8 time is reminiscent of a delicate, sophisticated rumba. We have a treat in store with a wonderful evening of wonderful music!