A Great Moment of Czech Music at the Prague Spring Festival
“The evening dedicated to Luboš Fišer will perhaps mean the most to me,” says violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja of the last of the three projects of her residency. On Sunday, 18 May, together with Finnish pianist Joonas Ahonen, she will perform at the Rudolfinum a trio of works by Fišer that belong to the golden fund of 20th century Czech chamber music: the violin sonatas Hands and In memoriam Terezín and the Piano Sonata No. 3. The second half of the concert will feature a certainly unconventional interpretation of Ludwig van Beethoven’s last violin sonata.
“My father always said that classical music is prestige, film music is lunch,” said his son Jan about Luboš Fišer. Fišer wrote over three hundred “lunches”, while his works for the concert stage are a real rarity. He has won a number of prestigious prizes for them: his composition for orchestra, Fifteen Pages after Dürer’s Apocalypse, won the 1965 Prague Spring Competition and the UNESCO Prize a year later, while his television adaptation of the opera Eternal Faust won first prize at the 1986 Salzburg Festival. Whole generations grew up on Fišer’s film work: on Antonín Moskalyk’s Granny, Karel Kachyňa’s The Nurses and The Golden Eels or Oldřich Lipský’s The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians and Adele’s Dinner. While children are still thrilled by the telephone receiver with a torn-off cord of Mach and Šebestová and the jingle of the magic ring from Arabella, adults still smilingly download “Orchestrion” from the series The Cottagers as a ringtone on their mobile phones. On the concert stage, however, Fišer’s music takes on a completely different, highly spiritual dimension. For example, the violin sonata Hands, which was originally to be called Crux but was eventually named after the poem of the same name by Otokar Březina, depicts the Stations of the Cross until the ecstatic conclusion of the Resurrection.
Luboš Fišer wanted people to understand his music. He wrote with passion and sincerity, backed by a deep knowledge of styles and craft. That is why his highly emotional, sonically arresting compositions have been performed on world stages by such artists as Gidon Kremer, Shizuka Ishikawa and Garrick Ohlsson. They will be joined at the Prague Spring Festival by Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Joonas Ahonen. It will be another great moment for Czech music.
