Czech Philharmonic • Simon Rattle

Like on many past occasions, Magdalena Kožená is returning to her homeland with her husband, Sir Simon Rattle. Kožená, a graduate of the Brno Conservatoire and of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, came to worldwide attention thanks in part to victory at the International Mozart Competition in 1995; four years later she signed an exclusive contract with the label Deutsche Grammophon, for which she has released many award-winning recordings (Gramophone Award, Echo Klassik, Diapason d’Or etc.). She divides her performing activities between recitals, concert appearances, and operatic roles including regular guest appearances at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. She also performs in such non-classical genres as swing and flamenco. Her classical repertoire is of remarkable breadth, ranging from the baroque era and collaborations with ensembles specialising in early music to the classical and romantic repertoire, in which she has won fame in part as a proponent of Czech music, and onwards to the music of today. Kožená, who has been honoured with the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, has sung the role of Anna in Weill’s work under her husband’s baton several times, most recently in the 2023/24 season at the Staatskapelle Berlin.

We have seen one of today’s most distinguished conductors, Sir Simon Rattle, relatively often at the Rudolfinum in recent years. His long-term cooperation with the Czech Philharmonic has led to his appointment together with his wife, mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, as Artist-in-Residence for the 2022/2023 season. At his appearances with the Czech Philharmonic, he has performed a number of symphonic works and, most notably, compositions for voices and orchestra from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the repertoire for which Rattle has been the most acclaimed. He appeared most recently at the Rudolfinum in February 2024 with the pianist Yuja Wang, with whom he made a Grammy-nominated recording from their joint tour of Asia in 2017. From the 2024/2025 season, he becomes the Principal Guest Conductor of the Czech Philharmonic.

A native of Liverpool and a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music has held a series of important positions in the course of his long career. He came to worldwide attention as the chief conductor of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, where he was employed for a full 18 years (for eight years as its music director); next came 16 years with the Berlin Philharmonic (2002–2018; artistic director and chief conductor) and six years with the London Symphony Orchestra. He opened the 2023/2024 season as chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. He also leads the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with the title of “principle artist”, and he is the founder of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Besides holding full-time conducting posts, he maintains ties with the world’s leading orchestras and gives concerts frequently in Europe, the USA, and Asia.

He has made more than 70 recordings for EMI (now Warner Classics). He has won a number of prestigious international awards for his recordings including three Grammy Awards for Mahler’s Symphony No. 10, Brahms’s German Requiem, and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, which he recorded with the Berlin Philharmonic.

Besides the prizes mentioned above, Rattle’s long-term partnership with the Berlin Philharmonic also led to the new educational programme Zukunft@Bphil, which has achieved great success. Even after moving on from that orchestra, Rattle did not abandon his engagement with music education, and he has taken part together with the London Symphony Orchestra in the creation of the LSO East London Academy. Since 2019, that organisation has been seeking out talented young musicians, developing their potential free of charge regardless of their origins and financial situation.

By the mid-1890s, Antonín Dvořák was a composer acknowledged around the world for his “absolute” music, but surprisingly he changed direction suddenly towards programmatic genres. An even greater surprise for many was his choice of subject matter: gloomy ballades from the collection Kytice (A Bouquet) by Karel Jaromír Erben. Dvořák was captivated by Erben’s poetry for many years. Already in 1884, he had composed a cantata based on the ballade The Spectre’s Bride, but now he chose four more poems for purely orchestral compositions. He composed the first three symphonic poems based on Erben’s ballades (The Water Goblin, The Noon Witch, and The Golden Spinning Wheel) in the first half of 1896, and all three received their official premieres in October and November of that year in London, just as he was composing a fourth symphonic poem titled The Wild Dove (Holoubek) about a woman who poisons her husband. The whole work is based on a single motif that is transformed according to the moods of the individual sections—a funeral march, meeting a young man, a wedding celebration, all leading to the tragic ending; pangs of conscience, symbolised by the dove’s mournful cooing above the grave of the poisoned husband, drive the woman to suicide. The Wild Dove was premiered on 20 March 1898 in Brno by the Czech Symphony Orchestra with Leoš Janáček conducting, and on 3 December 1899 it was performed by the Vienna Philharmonic with Gustav Mahler conducting in Vienna.

The collection Evening Songs (Večerní písně) by Vítězslav Hálek (1835–1874) was published in 1859. It contained more than 60 poems inspired by Hálek’s love for his future wife. The simple lyricism, similar in character to folk poetry, was perfectly suited for Antonín Dvořák, whose Evening Songs are usually dated to 1876, but some of them may have been composed earlier. They were printed successively by three different publishers, so they have different opus numbers. Op. 3 was published by Hoffmeister in Leipzig (1880), Op. 9 was published that same year by Schlesinger in Berlin, and Op. 31 was issued in 1883 by F. A. Urbánek’s publishing house in Prague. Dvořák made arrangements of the songs “Mně zdálo se” (“I dreamt last night”) and „Já jsem ten rytíř“ (“I am that knight”) with orchestral accompaniment, which were first performed by the baritone Josef Lev on 6 December 1882 with the orchestra of the National Theatre conducted by Adolf Čech. The composer Jiří Gemrot (*1957) created the orchestral arrangement of the other songs.

In 1862 the poet Gustav Pfleger Moravský (1833–1875) published a collection of poetry titled Cypresses (Cypřiše), which inspired Dvořák to compose his very first song cycle. Dvořák had especially intimate feelings towards these songs, and he never attempted to have them performed in public or published as a whole (Cypresses was not published in that form until 2013), but he kept returning to the cycle. The mood of Pfleger’s poems tends to be compared to the verses of Wilhelm Müller, which Franz Schubert set to music, or of Heinrich Heine, who inspired Robert Schumann. From Dvořák’s musical setting, it is apparent that both composers served as his models. Four revised songs from the original Cypresses, two of which are on today’s programme, were issued in 1882 as Songs, Op. 2 by the Prague publisher Emanuel Starý.

The poet Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914) was famed mainly for his farcical verses and the nonsense collection Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs), first published in 1905. It was not by chance that Hans Krása chose to set Morgenstern’s verses to music. Many of his works exhibit a tendency towards the grotesque and irony even during the most difficult times of his life under the racial persecution that brought his life to a violent end. Krása’s musical setting was first performed on 4 May 1921 at one of the philharmonic concerts of the New German Theatre with the singer Max Klein and the conductor Alexander Zemlinsky. “Hans Krása’s first work, the Orchestral Songs to Verses by Christian Morgenstern, is mistitled because while they are nothing less than orchestra songs in the usual sense, if they sail under a false flag, they create an impression on the public that the composer did not want,” wrote the critic Ernst Rychnovsky after the premiere. “By their nature, these songs are orchestral grotesques accompanied by a singing voice. Emphasising the word ‘grotesque’ allows the correct distancing to arise between the work and its effect on the public, so something that might cause shaking heads if perceived in the wrong way becomes easier to understand and grasp.”

Krása’s short motifs correspond to the curtness of Morgenstern’s verses, and he achieves a parodistic character by contrasts of pitch ranges, glissandos, notes played with mutes, tone painting, and also, for example, a passing but clear reference to Debussy in the song “The Goat and the Blindworm” or to the duet “Faithful loving” from The Bartered Bride in the song “No!”. The composer offered the score to Universal Edition in Vienna for publication—with the title Four Orchestral Grotesques, possibly on the basis of a review by Ernst Rychnovský—but it did not appear in print. On 16 December 1991 the rediscovered work was performed by the RIAS Youth Orchestra with the soloist Simona Alex and the conductor Israel Yinon in Berlin.

In 1929 the poet Emanuel Harusi (whose real name was Emmanuel Novogrebelski, 1903–1979) wrote the text of the lullaby “Sch’chaw b’ni” under the impression of the news of the birth of his son. Harusi came from the Russian town Nikolayev. The ideas of Theodore Herzl caught on with the town’s strong Jewish community, and they influenced the young poet. He moved to Palestine, and a melody he had known since childhood as the “niggun of Shalom Kharitonov” (Kharitonov’s brother Ahron is sometimes identified as the author) inspired him. The song’s popularity can also be seen from the Lullaby (Ukolébavka) by Gideon Klein, dated 6 February 1943 in Theresienstadt. Klein set Harusi’s words to his own music. The autograph, kept at the Jewish Museum in Prague, consists of two pages of notation for voice and piano written in ink. The text (transcribed into the Latin alphabet) is added in pencil. Klein’s musical setting sets up a polarity between the major and minor modes, expressing solace, bitterness, sorrow, desire, and hopelessness so eloquently that it needs no words. The version of the Lullaby on today’s programme has been orchestrated by Jiří Gemrot.

Taras Bulba, a rhapsody for orchestra by Leoš Janáček, is one of the expressions of the composer’s Russophilism. Since childhood he had been a proponent of Slavic traditions and Pan-Slavism, which became a political force in the 19th century. Towards the end of the century, this tendency was intensified by the danger threatened by Bismarck’s Germany. The ancient disputes among the Slavs themselves were overlooked. Since 1897, Janáček had been the chairman of Brno’s Russian Circle, and Russian themes appeared several times in his works. He began composing a symphonic rhapsody based on Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol’s story Taras Bulba in 1915. That year, the Russian Circle was banned because Russia was an enemy power at war with the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It is therefore no coincidence that Janáček chose heroic Russian subject matter at this time. The three movements of his composition embody three characters from Gogol’s tale – the Cossack ataman Taras and his sons Andrei and Ostap. In the context of the development of Russian literature, Gogol’s story (first published in 1835) was interpreted as an expression of “the idea of national liberation”, “a tableau vivant of former glory and greatness”. Janáček’s rhapsody focuses on the fates of three individuals, resulting in a shift of meaning in comparison with Gogol’s original. Andrei is killed by his own father for having betrayed his country for the love of a Polish noblewoman. Ostap is martyred before Taras’s eyes, and Taras himself is finally captured and burned at the stake (in the story, the deaths of Andrei and Ostap are mere episodes). In the first movement, we sense that the lengthy lyrical passage with an oboe melody represents Andrei’s love, while Taras’s revenge is characterised by the impact of the trombones. In the second movement, Ostap’s suffering is illustrated by string tremolos, trumpets, and clarinet, and in the third movement we recognise the rhythm of the krakowiak, a Polish folk dance (a symbol of the victorious Poles before the pyre where Taras burned at the stake). Organ and brass represent the apotheosis of the strange hero Taras, who has been turned—like so many others—from a marauding warrior into a national symbol. The composition was finished in 1918, and the premiere took place on 9 October 1921 with the orchestra of the National Theatre in Brno and František Neumann conducting. Václav Talich conducted the Prague premiere on 9 November 1924 with Czech Philharmonic.