The piece commissioned by Bavarian Radio and the London Symphony Orchestra was written for mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, who needs little introduction. She gave her debut at the Prague Spring in 1996, which was followed by six further appearances. Her most recent concert at the festival, where she teamed up with pianist Mitsuko Uchida, prompted the website operaplus.cz to describe this sell-out concert as “the pearl of the Prague Spring”. “Her technique is staggering,” wrote the site classicalexplorer.com on her performance in Where are You?. “Magdalena was hoping to have more ‘singing’ in the piece and I was again insisting on a half-whispered voice, a low register, pronunciation of each phoneme, and strict rhythm like beat-boxing,” says Ondřej Adámek on his work. Then you have the texts in several languages: Aramaic, Czech, Spanish, English and Sanskrit. The singer, whose career has seen her working alongside such stellar names as Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Pierre Boulez, thus faces all manner of new artistic challenges in this piece.

Symphony No. 86 by Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) is part of a cycle of six “Paris” symphonies commissioned by the Paris-based company Concerts de la Loge Olympique, whose musical performances were attended by the likes of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. According to period sources the work was premiered to huge acclaim in 1787 and was later also presented in the popular Concert Spirituel series. Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) likewise enjoyed deserved recognition at the premiere of his fourth and last symphony, held in 1885 in the German town of Meiningen. After the success of the Second and Third Symphonies he didn’t want to disappoint his supporters, and on this occasion he had misgivings as to whether his next, possibly his last, symphonic work would live up to the reputation of his previous efforts. In August 1885 he sent the first movement to his friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, adding the note: “Would you… tell me what you think of it? … Cherries never get ripe for eating in these parts [referring to the town of Mürzzuschlag up in the mountains], so don’t be afraid to say if you don’t like the taste. I’m not at all eager to write a bad No. 4.” When one of his friends in Vienna wrote to him after the summer vacation, asking if he had written any string quartet or similar during the holidays, the maestro answered sensibly: “Nothing so grand as that! Once again I’ve just thrown together a bunch of polkas and waltzes.” The piece does indeed incorporate certain dance elements, while its culmination is the last movement, a masterful Passacaglia, at whose close we hear Brahms’s “fate” motif in the timpani.

Three exceptional works performed by one of the world’s greatest orchestras under one of the world’s finest conductors, Sir Simon Rattle. Don’t miss the start of the Prague Spring. Thanks to Adámek’s premiere you’ll also hear authentic cimbalom band music played by the BRSO!

His Prague Spring debut will have a strong American flavour. The programme opens with Four Dance Episodes by Aaron Copland (1900–1990) from the ballet Rodeo which, during its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera on 16 October 1942, received twenty-two curtain calls! Copland wrote extremely colourful, energetic and, at the same time, lyrical music, evoking the atmosphere of classic American Westerns (a honky-tonk piano even appears in the score at one point), to accompany a choreography by Agnes de Mille. The latter developed the story of an American Cowgirl at Burnt Ranch, who finds herself competing with visiting city girls for the attention of the local cowboys. The composition treats a number of American folk songs – If He’d Be a Buckaroo by His Trade, Old Paint or the ballad Sis Joe – and ends with the closing country hop Hoe-Down in the style of the American square dance. The work, which almost didn’t see the light of day since, at their first meeting, Agnes de Mille sent Copland “to the deuce”, was commissioned and premiered by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a dance company established in 1932 – named after the famous Ballets Russes headed by impresario Sergei Diaghilev – which moved to the United States during the Second World War.

Five years later another classic of American music, Samuel Barber (1910–1981), wrote an expressive piece entitled Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Barber, who at the tender age of seven sent his mother the telling message “I was not meant to be an athlete, but a composer, and I will be, I am sure. Don’t ask me to go and play football,” wrote the piece at the request of soprano Eleanor Steber. He selected an extract from the novel A Death in the Family by James Agee, amongst others, the screenwriter for the film The African Queen featuring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart. A young boy lies in the grass at his home in Knoxville in the state of Tennessee, listening to the sounds around him. He hears the “iron moan” of a streetcar and the “bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks”. He looks up at the sky, reflects on the sorrows of life and asks God to bless his family; and with this prayer he is taken in and put to bed. Agee’s recollections are autobiographical and indirectly allude to the death of his father, who was killed in a car accident in 1916 when Agee was seven years old. The music suggests to us that Barber was himself a highly proficient singer and that he understood the workings of the human voice. This lyrical work with its exquisite, arching vocal line was premiered by Eleanor Steber, accompanied by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under conductor Serge Koussevitzky.

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.

The fact that Jakub Jan Ryba is known, above all, for his Czech Christmas Mass is understandable yet objectively lacks justification. Testimony of this lies in the dramatic, turbulent Stabat Mater, one of Ryba’s most extensive works written for Plzeň’s church community over a period of just six weeks, at a time when the composer, as he described it, “struggled with his common malady”. We are not aware of the precise manifestation of Ryba’s illness, yet it was evidently of a psychological nature, and thus we can assume that, during his work on Stabat Mater, his mental state enabled him to touch the very limits of his compositional faculties. “We hear a combination of passionate, sensitive style, a highly developed, early Romantic orchestral sound world, and a solid musical language based on classical German and Austrian models,” Aapo Häkkinen tells us. The life of Jakub Jan Ryba ended prematurely as well; he was only fifty years of age. Despite this, apart from his celebrated “Hey, Master” Christmas Mass, he also left behind approximately 1,500 other works and can justifiably be classed among the greatest Czech composers of the late Classical and early Romantic eras.

The programme presented in the Rudolfinum by the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra will be purely exploratory, bringing to light another piece of uncharted yet important Czech musical history. It will certainly be intriguing to hear this music in its “Scandinavian” conception, moreover, with five superb singers, who regularly appear in prestigious venues in Salzburg, Munich, Berlin, Glyndebourne, Leipzig, London, Paris and New York. In all respects, a fascinating and thrilling prospect!

Co-operating partner: Haydneum – Hungarian Centre for Early Music. The Prime Minister’s Office (Hungary) and Bethlen Gábor Alapkezelő Zrt. support the operation of Haydneum.

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.

Conductor, harpsichordist and visionary of historically informed interpretation Václav Luks is one of the most eminent figures on the European classical music scene. Together with his orchestra Collegium 1704 and vocal ensemble Collegium Vocale 1704 he appears in leading European venues in Berlin, Vienna, Salzburg, Amsterdam, London and elsewhere. As a conductor he regularly performs with leading early music ensembles and modern symphony orchestras, including Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, the Czech Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony and also the Orchestre national de France, with whom he performed at a benefit concert in support of the restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral. He returns to the Prague Spring with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, one of the most noteworthy period instrument ensembles. The orchestra’s history goes back to the mid-1980s, when it was established by a group of musicians who wanted to experience more than conventional orchestral practice. They gradually built up a unique, self-governing ensemble which performs a broad repertoire without a principal conductor; they select distinguished conductors individually for their chosen projects, and have been headed by the likes of Sir Simon Rattle, Vladimir Jurowski, Iván Fischer and William Christie. Their programme for this season includes Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the BBC Proms and the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, Beethoven and Mozart symphonies with Ádám Fischer and Robin Ticciati at London’s Southbank Centre, and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique with Sir Simon Rattle. Together with the affiliated Choir of the Age of Enlightenment, they last appeared in Prague under conductor Masaaki Suzuki in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, performed at the Prague Spring Advent Concert. This isn’t the first collaboration between the orchestra and Václav Luks: They joined forces at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2023 for a hugely successful production of Händel’s opera Semele.

Three top-flight soloists will be joining the ensembles in Prague. The Australian-British soprano Samantha Clarke is a graduate of the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. As a soloist she has appeared with the celebrated Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra in works by Georg Friedrich Händel and Johann Sebastian Bach, and she has sung Mozart roles in opera houses in Australia and Japan. The English tenor Nick Pritchard has made a name for himself as a leading performer of works by Bach and he is critically acclaimed for his interpretation of the Evangelist in the St John and St Matthew Passions. He has also recorded both works with Sir John Eliot Gardiner for the Deutsche Grammophon label. He has appeared with period instrument ensembles such as Ensemble Pygmalion, Gabrieli Consort and Les Talens Lyriques and has also made his debut at the BBC Proms in Mozart’s Requiem. Croatian bass-baritone Krešimir Stražanac is likewise a leading performer of Baroque music, and this season sees him appearing in works by Johann Sebastian Bach with Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Klaus Mäkelä and with the celebrated Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin conducted by Peter Dijkstra. His concert repertoire, however, spans an arc from the Baroque masters to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and to the songs of Gustav Mahler. He has given his debuts with the Berlin and Los Angeles Philharmonics, the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and at the Salzburg Festival. He was a member of the Zurich Opera company for seven years. Since 2016 he has been working regularly with Philippe Herreweghe, Collegium Vocale Gent and Orchestre des Champs-Elysées.

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

“His tenor is limpid and focused, but with a range of colour unusual in an instrument so essentially lyric,” wrote Opera News magazine, describing the performance of American tenor Paul Appleby. After graduating from the Juilliard School he enlisted for the prestigious Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at the Metropolitan Opera, where he regularly returns to this day as one of the stars of this venue. He has collaborated with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Sir Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra, Riccardo Muti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Santtu-Matias Rouvali heading the Munich Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst. The composer John Adams wrote the role of Caesar for him in his opera Antony and Cleopatra, which was premiered by the Met. The role of Faust in The Damnation of Faust is entirely familiar to him; last season he sang the part with the Gulbenkian Orchestra under Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu.

Alexander Vinogradov was only twenty-one when he gave his debut as Oroveso in Bellini’s Norma at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow; since that time he has earned his position among the world’s singing elite. Last season he returned to Milan’s Teatro alla Scala and to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and this season he is singing the part of the Water Sprite in Dvořák’s Rusalka at the Vienna State Opera. On the concert platform he has sung the part of Ivan in Prokofiev’s music for the film Ivan the Terrible with Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España under Pablo González, and he appeared in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14, accompanied by the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko. He has also worked with such conducting names as Daniel Barenboim and Zubin Mehta.

Mezzo-soprano Štěpánka Pučálková will be making her festival debut in the role of Marguerite. “It is a great honour for me to sing at a celebrated and important festival with such an enduring tradition,” she stated. A finalist at the International Hans Gabor Belvedere Singing Competition in Vienna and holder of the Special Award for Female Voice at the Concours International de Bel Canto Vincenzo Bellini in Marseille, she has been engaged as a soloist at the Semperoper in Dresden since 2018. In addition to this she has made guest appearances at Vienna’s Volksoper, the Theater an der Wien, Prague’s National Theatre and at opera venues in Florence, Naples and Leipzig. Under Christian Thielemann she debuted in 2017 at the Salzburg Easter Festival and the Beijing Music Festival. The French repertoire suits her voice extremely well; for the role of Charlotte in Massenet’s opera Werther she was nominated for a Thalia Award.

Soloist at the National Theatre Opera and State Opera Pavel Švingr gave his debut at the leading Czech opera venue in 2009 and since then has created a whole series of different roles. In addition to well-established works he has also appeared in lesser-known operas such as Dmitri Shostakovich’s Antiformalist Rayok, Death in Venice by Benjamin Britten or Alexander Zemlinsky’s Kleider machen Leute (Clothes make the man). He studied at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. He won the Kammeroper Schloss Rheinsberg International Singing Competition in Berlin.

Conductor Tomáš Netopil first appeared at the Prague Spring in 2004. Since that time there have been another ten concerts, among them we could mention the Closing Concert with the Prague Symphony Orchestra in 2016, the Opening Concert with the Czech Philharmonic in 2018 and his guest appearance with the Essener Philharmoniker in 2023. After his ten years’ tenure in Essen Tomáš Netopil assumed the post of Chief Conductor of the Prague Symphony in September 2025 and, for the Prague Spring, it is a great honour that, in their first season together at the festival, they will be presenting a work of such significance, magnitude and beauty as La Damnation de Faust. For this music truly contains everything Mephistopheles promises Faust – “happiness, pleasure, all that the most ardent desire can dream of”!

Composer and pianist Michal Nejtek (*1977) is inspired by “everything that is original, truthful and strong”, whether this is jazz, rock, alternative or mediaeval music. Although it might seem that his own compositions would consist in genre fusions, the opposite is true: “For me, it’s much more interesting to marvel at the differences and distances between genres than to create a haphazard mélange of a piece,” he says. Despite this, his music universally conveys his great flexibility, experience and broad outlook as a musician which, together with his considerable invention, allow him to create exceptional compositions. It will indeed be fascinating, in fact, thrilling to hear the new work he is writing for Ensemble Modern who, as superb players, always offer composers great potential as performers. Nejtek’s compositions have featured at a number of prestigious international contemporary music festivals such as Donaueschinger Musiktage, Warsaw Autumn and Klangspuren Schwaz. He wrote the opera Rules for Good Manners in the Modern World for Brno’s National Theatre, and the symphony The Basement Sketches for the Brno Philharmonic. He writes regularly for the MoEns ensemble and Berg Orchestra, and he collaborates with the Agon Orchestra, Michal Pavlíček & Trio, the jazz-rock trio NTS and the band The Plastic People of the Universe. As a composer of music for the theatre he has worked with stage directors Arnošt Goldflam, Jiří Ornest, Jiří Havelka, Jiří Adámek and the duo SKUTR. For the Prague Spring he wrote the piece Ultramarine, premiered in 2018 by the Warsaw Philharmonic, and also Trobairitz, written to texts by medieval female troubadours, which was premiered by the Tiburtina Ensemble in 2022 as part of the project Visions and Dreams and was subsequently released on CD. Among other things, with Ensemble Modern he shares a passion for the music of Frank Zappa.