“The scope of Adámek’s imagination is dazzling, as is the ferocious energy that courses through the veins of his music. It is not for the faint-hearted, but then neither was Beethoven’s Fifth or The Rite of Spring. This is music that grabs the listener by the ears and doesn’t let go. I found it completely exhilarating,” wrote David McDade in his review of Where are You? on musicweb-international.com, the biggest world classical music website. He later added: “Almost miraculously he manages to be both uncompromisingly modernist and yet intensely communicative.” Globetrotter Ondřej Adámek (*1979), who spent a large part of his life in France and Germany and is now at home in Spain, is one of the most respected composers on the scene today. His music is commissioned and performed by some of the world’s finest orchestras, including the BRSO, the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble intercontemporain and Ensemble Modern, the Ensemble-in-Residence of Prague Offspring. In the years 2014 and 2015 he was awarded a scholarship at Académie de France and was thus able to work in the renowned Villa Medici in Rome like his famous predecessors Claude Debussy, Lili Boulanger, Eugène Bozza, Henri Dutilleux, Tristan Murail and Bruno Mantovani. “Where are You? represents a journey through various states of mind, various faiths, and various questions: where can we find the divine? Yet we won’t get an answer because it’s impossible to achieve This,” he states. “The piece is about the lightness of our soul, which takes us up to heaven, and about the oppressiveness of our body, which brutally forces us back to earth.”

The other Bartók work on the programme will be Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra No. 2 played by soloist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. She, too, has a great affinity for Bartók. “I think I understand his language. In any case, it’s very close to my soul, but not merely for geographical reasons, since we both come from the same part of the globe, but it’s his true love of rural life, of folk music, it’s his dedication to this culture, which makes sense of my life as well. Folk music is the earth from which I grew up, it’s my soil, my smells, my plants, it’s my story. I feel at home with his music,” says Patricia.

The second, highly anticipated performance by Patricia Kopatchinskaja at this concert will be Concerto for Violin and Orchestra by Luboš Fišer (1935–1999), the composer’s final work for violin, written in 1997. At the Prague Spring in 2025 Patricia presented his Crux for violin, timpani and bells, and the violin sonatas “In memoriam Terezín” and “Hands”, all of which captured the imagination of public and critics alike. “It was the kind of magical evening that I hadn’t experienced all that often at the Prague Spring this century. The celebration of the Czech composer Luboš Fišer was such that it literally took my breath away,” wrote Luboš Stehlík on the website Polyharmonie.cz. Kopatchinskaja, a native of Moldova known for her imaginative, perhaps almost fanciful performances, who has had numerous residencies at such institutions as London’s Southbank Centre and Barbican Centre, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, and the Elbphilharmonie, approaches the music of this timid, modest and somewhat enigmatic genius of 20th century Czech music with her typical passion. “I think we really should make Luboš Fišer famous throughout the world, because his music is so incredibly personal and strong and it has something very, very special,” she says. “I certainly shouldn’t get any credit for the fact that Patricia discovered him and fell in love with his music,” Jakub Hrůša adds with a trace of humility. “On the contrary, I was surprised and touched when she came to tell me how much she admired Fišer’s concerto and that she really wanted to perform it with me. Luboš Fišer is one of my favourite 20th century composers, but I haven’t yet had the honour of conducting his works. So I’m really looking forward to it!”

“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,” Patricia speaks openly about what she would like to convey to her audience from the podium. Her joint appearance with the Czech Philharmonic and Jakub Hrůša at the Prague Spring 2026 will certainly appeal to anyone who’s looking to experience something quite out of the ordinary.

Luboš Fišer’s swansong. The Violin Concerto is revived. An article in the Bärenreiter-Magazin “Takte” by Jiří Slabihoudek

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.

The fact that contemporary music can be innovative, playful, adventurous and daring in equal parts is evident right from the start with the first piece on tonight’s programme, Akrostichon-Wortspiel (Acrostic-Wordplay) for soprano and instrumental ensemble, whose specific sound is determined, among others, by special tuning and the use of instruments such as the mandolin and the harmonica (mouth organ). Unsuk Chin wrote the piece in the early 1990s to texts from the novel Through the Looking-Glass by her beloved author Lewis Carroll and from the fantasy adventure The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. “The selected texts have been worked upon in different ways,” she says. “Sometimes the consonants and vowels have been randomly joined together, at other times the words have been read backwards so that the symbolic meaning alone remains. Each of the seven pieces is constructed around a controlling pitch centre but in their means of expression they are fully differentiated from one another. Seven different situations of emotional states, as described in the fairytales, ranging from the bright to the grotesque, are brought to expression.” Akrostichon-Wortspiel has literally travelled the world, performed by the likes of Ensemble Modern, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Philharmonia Orchestra in London.

The Double Concerto for piano, percussion and ensemble also makes the most of special sound effects, where certain strings in the body of the piano are modified in order to sound percussive. Like the majority of her works, here, too, Chin endeavours to create a combination of colours which defy the European perception of music and manifest her affinity with non-European cultures of the East.

Percussion instruments are also dominant in the extraordinarily focused, virtuosic piece Rebonds by Greek-French composer and graduate of the National Technical University in Athens, Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001). In order to master this two-part composition, in which each part introduces a completely different emotion and type of concentration, the percussionist requires not only flawless technique and whole body coordination, but also the ability to work deftly with the intensity of sound and also with time. It’s such a heightened experience that, even though the whole piece is performed by a single player, if you close your eyes, you imagine you’re hearing an entire ensemble of percussion instruments.

Ilan Volkov became familiar to the general public at only 23 years of age when he was named assistant to the then Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa. This appointment launched his colourful international career, a fundamental part of which was his tenure with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, where he held the position of Principal Conductor in the years 2003–2009; in the period 2009–2024 he was Principal Guest Conductor and today he collaborates with the orchestra as Creative Partner. As well as being a respected performer of classical music from previous eras, he is also a key figure on the international contemporary music scene, a genre he promotes assiduously. In 2012 he launched the Tectonics festival, which very soon became one of the world’s most important and most progressive platforms for new music. Under Volkov’s direction Tectonics has grown into a global network of festivals with branches in Glasgow, Reykjavik, Tel Aviv, New York, Oslo, Athens, Kraków and Adelaide, providing an opportunity for meetings between avantgarde composers, improvisers and experimenters from all over the world. Volkov collaborates with the finest ensembles specialising in contemporary music, such as Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien and Ensemble intercontemporain. He has performed the premieres of a whole series of works, including those by Unsuk Chin, Missy Mazzoli and Hans Abrahamsen. He is a regular guest at the Salzburg, Lucerne and Edinburgh festivals and the BBC Proms, where he combines traditional and contemporary repertoires. He has earned numerous distinctions for his many recordings, among them several Gramophone Awards.

Ensemble Modern has been defining trends on the contemporary music scene for decades now. The British newspaper The Guardian described them as “Frankfurt-based musicians who, for their versatility and virtuosity, have few peers among Europe’s specialist contemporary music groups”. The ensemble was founded in Frankfurt in 1980; today its core consists of eighteen soloists from Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, India, Japan, Switzerland and the USA. Each year members of the ensemble study around seventy new works, approximately twenty of which will then be given their world premieres. Typically open to all manner of genres, Ensemble Modern also includes in its programmes music theatre productions, dance performances and multimedia projects. With an extended players’ list the ensemble’s members also perform symphonic works under the name Ensemble Modern Orchestra. Over the decades since they were established almost half a century ago they have cultivated close relationships with leading contemporary composers, among them Unsuk Chin, Olga Neuwirth, Heiner Goebbels, Helmut Lachenmann, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Wolfgang Rihm and Steve Reich. Their recordings of these composers’ works, which Ensemble Modern also releases on its own label, are considered referential. In addition to concerts presented as part of its own subscription series at Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, the ensemble is a regular guest at prestigious festivals and concert venues, including Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Berliner Festspiele, Holland Festival, London’s Wigmore Hall and South Bank Centre and New York’s Carnegie Hall. In 2003 they launched the International Ensemble Modern Academy, which provides opportunities for all kinds of educational projects, with the aim of sharing and mediating the latest artistic movements and trends in various formats. The Academy offers, for instance, a master’s programme in contemporary music performance at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt, international composers’ and conductors’ seminars, and educational projects for children and teenagers.

“The word Gougalōn derives from Old High German [the term used for the earliest form of the German language documented in written texts, which was spoken between the years 750 and 1050 A.D.] and inherent in it are the following meanings: to hoodwink; to make ridiculous movements; to fool someone by means of feigned magic; to practice fortune-telling,” says Unsuk Chin (*1961), referring to the title of her work. She was inspired to write the piece during her first trip to China in 2008 and then in 2009, when she visited Hong Kong and Guangzhou. “The atmosphere of the old and poor residential neighbourhoods with their narrow, winding alleys, ambulatory food vendors, and marketplaces – all this not far from supersized video screens, ultramodern buildings, and glittering shopping centres – brought to mind long forgotten childhood experiences. It reminded me very much of Seoul of the 1960s, of the period after the Korean War and before the radical modernisation. Of conditions that no longer exist in today’s (South) Korea. I was particularly reminded of a troupe of entertainers I saw a number of times as a child in a suburb of Seoul. These amateur musicians and actors travelled from village to village in order to foist self-made medicines – which were ineffective at best – on the people. To lure the villagers, they put on a play with singing, dancing, and various stunts. This was all extremely amateurish and kitschy, yet it aroused incredible emotions among the spectators: this is hardly surprising, considering that it was practically the only entertainment in an everyday life marked by poverty and repressive structures. Entertainment electronics and toys (not to mention art) were of course unknown. Therefore, the whole village was present at this “big event”, a circumstance from which others also desired to profit: fortune-tellers, mountebanks, and travelling hawkers. Among these were also wig dealers from whom young girls could earn some money for their families by sacrificing their pigtails. Gougalōn does not refer directly to the dilettante and shabby music of that street theatre. This piece is about an “imaginary folk music” that is stylised, broken within itself, and only apparently primitive,” Chin adds.

The piece Chamber Nôise by Ondřej Adámek (*1979) is also inspired by Asian theatre, specifically the Japanese Noh music theatre and Bunraku puppet theatre. Written for cello and double bass, its performance requires not only extreme concentration throughout but also proficiency in all manner of playing techniques, allowing the musicians to produce a variety of astonishing sounds; they have to master certain stage gestures as well, which Adámek equates with the movements of Sumo wrestlers. The players likewise sing and recite Buddhist sutras in Chinese and Sanskrit, along with texts in Japanese and French. Ondřej Adámek, whose music will also be performed at the Prague Spring 2026 by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra with Magdalena Kožená and Simon Rattle, is one of the most respected composers on the scene today. His music is commissioned and performed by some of the world’s finest orchestras, including the BRSO, the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble intercontemporain and Ensemble Modern. In the years 2014 and 2015 he was awarded a scholarship at Académie de France and was thus able to work in the renowned Villa Medici in Rome like his famous predecessors Claude Debussy, Lili Boulanger, Eugène Bozza, Henri Dutilleux, Tristan Murail and Bruno Mantovani. Critics describe him as someone “uncompromisingly modernist and yet intensely communicative,” whose music “grabs the listener by the ears and doesn’t let go.”

Ilan Volkov became familiar to the general public at only 23 years of age when he was named assistant to the then Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa. This appointment launched his colourful international career, a fundamental part of which was his tenure with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, where he held the position of Principal Conductor in the years 2003–2009; in the period 2009-2024 he was Principal Guest Conductor and today he collaborates with the orchestra as Creative Partner. As well as being a respected performer of classical music from previous eras, he is also a key figure on the international contemporary music scene, a genre he promotes assiduously. In 2012 he launched the Tectonics festival, which very soon became one of the world’s most important and most progressive platforms for new music. Under Volkov’s direction Tectonics has grown into a global network of festivals with branches in Glasgow, Reykjavik, Tel Aviv, New York, Oslo, Athens, Kraków and Adelaide, providing an opportunity for meetings between avantgarde composers, improvisers and experimenters from all over the world. Volkov collaborates with the finest ensembles specialising in contemporary music, such as Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien and Ensemble intercontemporain. He has performed the premieres of a whole series of works, including those by Unsuk Chin, Missy Mazzoli and Hans Abrahamsen. He is a regular guest at the Salzburg, Lucerne and Edinburgh festivals and the BBC Proms, where he combines traditional and contemporary repertoires. He has earned numerous distinctions for his many recordings, among them several Gramophone Awards.

Ensemble Modern has been defining trends on the contemporary music scene for decades now. The British newspaper The Guardian described them as “Frankfurt-based musicians who, for their versatility and virtuosity, have few peers among Europe’s specialist contemporary music groups”. The ensemble was founded in Frankfurt in 1980; today its core consists of eighteen soloists from Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, India, Japan, Switzerland and the USA. Each year members of the ensemble study around seventy new works, approximately twenty of which will then be given their world premieres. Typically open to all manner of genres, Ensemble Modern also includes in its programmes music theatre productions, dance performances and multimedia projects. With an extended players’ list the ensemble’s members also perform symphonic works under the name Ensemble Modern Orchestra. Over the decades since they were established almost half a century ago they have cultivated close relationships with leading contemporary composers, among them Unsuk Chin, Olga Neuwirth, Heiner Goebbels, Helmut Lachenmann, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Wolfgang Rihm and Steve Reich. Their recordings of these composers’ works, which Ensemble Modern also releases on its own label, are considered referential. In addition to concerts presented as part of its own subscription series at Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, the ensemble is a regular guest at prestigious festivals and concert venues, including Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Berliner Festspiele, Holland Festival, London’s Wigmore Hall and South Bank Centre and New York’s Carnegie Hall. In 2003 they launched the International Ensemble Modern Academy, which provides opportunities for all kinds of educational projects, with the aim of sharing and mediating the latest artistic movements and trends in various formats. The Academy offers, for instance, a master’s programme in contemporary music performance at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt, international composers’ and conductors’ seminars, and educational projects for children and teenagers.