In the Swedish Footsteps of Bedřich Smetana

The Friends of Prague Spring trip to Gothenburg took place between 18 and 21 March. Sweden’s second largest city is home to one of Europe’s finest ensembles, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, which with its Finnish chief conductor Sanut-Mathias Rouvalli and pianist Jan Lisiecki will perform at this year’s 80th Prague Spring Festival. The Czech composer Bedřich Smetana also spent time in the capital on the west coast of the Scandinavian country. He also composed three so-called Swedish symphonic poems there. One of them, Hakon Jarl, inspired by the life of the Norwegian king Haakon Sigurdsson, will be performed at the beginning of the orchestra’s festival debut.

After an opening dinner in the hotel restaurant, the program began the following day with a rehearsal of the orchestra’s evening concert. In the afternoon, there was a tour of the unique concert hall that houses the orchestra. The modernist building space, dominated by marble and warm shades of wood, was designed in 1935 by architect Nils Einar Ericsson, and the Friends of Prague Spring were guided through it by Katarina Danielsson, a native of Slovakia who made her life’s work with the local orchestra. The day culminated in a concert at which the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Anna Rakitina, and the brothers Arthur and Lucas Jussen, well known to the Prague audience from their extremely successful Czech debut at the Rudolf Firkušný Piano Festival, appeared as soloists in Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos.

The morning of the second day was devoted to an individual tour of the city. In the afternoon, the tour was hosted by musicologist Anders Carlsson, whose specialty is the musical history of the city. He took the Friends of Prague Spring to Stora Nygatan Street on the banks of the canal, where Bedřich Smetana stayed during his stay, and together they illuminated the interiors of the neoclassical Bursa building, normally inaccessible to the public, and the historic headquarters of the Freemasons, where Bedřich Smetana held concerts. That evening, patrons had the opportunity to attend a performance of English composer Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimmes at the Gothenburg Opera House, built on the shores of the North Sea bay in the early 1990s.

Thank you to all the patrons who joined us for another memorable trip abroad.