Opening concert

„Má vlast (My Country) is not about blind nationalism. It is written with genuine and entirely disarming love for our native land,” says Petr Popelka, Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, with whom he opens the 81st edition of the Prague Spring in 2026. At this special moment we also mark one hundred years since the founding of this principal Czech symphony orchestra which, through its many bold artistic projects, is now etched not only into the history of the Prague Spring but also into the modern musical history of our country. Petr Popelka, currently one of the world’s most highly sought-after conductors, will join Karel Ančerl, Václav Neumann, Claudio Abbado, Neeme Järvi, Vladimír Válek and Krzysztof Penderecki as another remarkable individual to lead this superb Czech orchestra at the Prague Spring.

“What is his secret? Top-level musicianship, plainly,” wrote The Times of Petr Popelka. The veracity of these words is attested by his meteoric rise as a conductor. In 2019 he decided to exchange his secure position as a double bassist in the Staatskapelle Dresden for a place on the conductor’s rostrum, and after a year with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester as assistant to Principal Conductor Alan Gilbert he was appointed in 2020 as Chief Conductor of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra. The year 2022 saw him take up the post of Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra and, a year later, the news quickly spread that he had been elected via secret ballot as Chief Conductor of the Vienna Symphony. He was the first Czech conductor to head a concert during the Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony and he has also given some important debuts, for instance with the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo and the Staatskapelle Berlin. His concert calendar for this season includes two major European tours with the Vienna Symphony, his return to Chicago, where he will perform the world premiere of a piece by composer Matthew Aucoin, also a visit to Cleveland with Yuja Wang and to the Bavarian State Opera. He will take up his baton for the first time with the Berlin and Munich Philharmonics, and with Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where he will be working with Hélène Grimaud.

Petr Popelka has made a series of recordings with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, among them a critically acclaimed triple album featuring orchestral music by Bedřich Smetana, dominated by a fervent, energetic interpretation of My Country. “The beauty of Popelka’s Prague RSO performance is that, although tension is maintained throughout each movement of My Country, textures remain transparent, which means that this most verdant of symphonic masterpieces never sounds enclosed,” wrote the British magazine Gramophone, which selected the recording as Editor’s Choice. In France the album then earned the coveted Diapason d’or Arte: “The storytelling skill of the father of Czech music, under Popelka’s precise, warm-hearted and enthusiastic direction, finds a truly colourful depiction, which also draws deeply on the richly nuanced palette crafted by the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra.”