Czech Philharmonic • Tom Borrow

In January 2019, Tom Borrow was called on to replace renowned pianist Khatia Buniatishvili in a series of 12 concerts with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. At only 36 hours’ notice, he performed to sensational public and critical acclaim. Chief music critic of the Israel Broadcasting Corporation, Yossi Schifmann, hailed his performance as “brilliant, outstanding… Tom Borrow is already a star and we will all surely hear more about him”. Tom has since been reinvited to the IPO multiple times. International Piano magazine ran a two-page feature on Tom, naming him their “One To Watch”, Gramophone gave him the same accolade (“an exciting young pianist...individuality and elegance") and Diapason has written “Tom Borrow already has everything of a great”. He has recently been named a BBC New Generation Artist 2021–2023.

Born in Tel Aviv in 2000, Tom Borrow has performed as soloist with all major orchestras of his native country and has won every national piano competition in Israel. He began studying piano with Michal Tal at the Givatayim Music Conservatory, and currently studies with Tomer Lev of the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music at Tel Aviv University. Tom has been regularly mentored by Murray Perahia, through the Jerusalem Music Centre.

After the IPO success, Tom has been invited by other major orchestras around the world – including the Cleveland Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Santa Cecilia Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, New Jersey Symphony, Basque National Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra and others – and by leading conductors Semyon Bychkov, Sakari Oramo, Thierry Fischer, Xian Zhang, Robert Trevino, Omer Wellber, Petr Altrichter and Yoel Levi. Tom has toured Eastern Europe with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, to regular standing ovations, and to South Korea with the Tel Aviv Soloists.

Equally in-demand on the chamber music front, Tom has been invited to the Verbier Festival, Wigmore Hall, Festival Piano aux Jacobins (Toulouse), Vancouver Recital Series and elsewhere. WWFM Radio (US) has featured Tom as an outstanding young talent, and RAI televised his recent Rome concert. His first album will be released soon, on Hanssler Classic.

Robert Kružík belongs to the youngest generation of Czech conductors. Since January 2016 he has been in a long-term engagement of the Janáček Opera House of the National Theatre in Brno. At the time, he was also engaged by the Moravian-Silesian Theatre in Ostrava (2016–2019).

Since the 2018/2019 season he has been a permanent guest conductor of the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra; since the 2021/2022 season he has been the Chief Conductor of the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic in Zlín. He is the laureate of the Jiří Bělohlávek Prize awarded to musicians under 30 years of age.

Kružík collaborates with many symphony orchestras such as the Czech Philharmonic, MDR-Sinfonieorchester, Philharmonia Narodowa, Brno Philharmonic, PKF – Prague Philharmonia, Prague Symphony Orchestra, Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra, Slovak Philharmonic, Slovak State Philharmonic in Košice, Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra in Ostrava, Czech Youth Philharmonic, Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra Olomouc, Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice and South Bohemian Philharmonic.

He is also invited to important festivals such as the Prague Spring Festival, Smetana’s Litomyšl, St. Wenceslas Music Festival and the Eufonia Festival.

At the National Theatre in Brno, Kružík directed his interpretation of Rossini’s opera Le Comte Ory, Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades and Eugene Onegin, Smetana’s Libuše (performed on the 100th anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia), Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Martinů’s Greek Passion and Verdi’s Otello. His wide operatic repertoire includes Mozart, Smetana, Dvořák, Martinů, Janáček, Donizetti, Rossini, Tchaikovsky, Bizet, Verdi, Puccini and others.

Born in Brno, he started as a cellist and later graduated from the Brno Conservatory where, in addition to playing cello (with Miroslav Zicha), he also studied conducting (with Stanislav Kummer). He continued his studies at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague; his teachers in conducting were Leoš Svárovský, Charles Olivieri-Munroe and Lubomír Mátl, while his cello teacher was Miroslav Petráš. In the academic year 2012/2013 Kružík studied at the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland where he focused on both subjects.

Kružík performed with success at several cello competitions, such as the Prague Spring Festival, the Bohuslav Martinů Foundation Interpretation Competition and Leoš Janáček International Competition. He broadened his experience and skills participating in master courses in cello performance under the guidance of Jiří Bárta, Michaela Fukačová and Raphael Wallfisch, and conducting with Norbert Baxa, Johannes Schlaefli and David Zinman.

In 1826, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy wrote the overture A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and at the same time Hector Berlioz was writing the first works from his series of concert overtures. The one-movement concert overture soon became an obligatory part of concert programmes, usually as the opening number, actually serving as an “overture to a concert”, where it took the place of opera overtures that had formerly played that role. In 1829, Mendelssohn visited Scotland, and his impressions from the experience are reflected in his Symphony No. 3 (“Scottish Symphony”) and the concert overture The Hebrides (also known as Fingal’s Cave). Fingal’s Cave is a geological formation on the island Staffa in the Inner Hebrides archipelago. It is associated with the Celtic legend of a king who lost his miraculous powers when he refused to help a wounded friend. Fingal (Fionn) is the hero of a cycle of epic poems by James Macpherson, famed as the “discoverer” of the songs of the historical bard Ossian. In reality, Macpherson invented both Ossian and the supposed Celtic (Scottish-Irish) legend. Doubts over the authenticity of Macpherson’s discovery began to appear early on, but the mysterious atmosphere of the legend and the geographical site inspired painters, poets, and musicians; the tale even found its way into the Czech arts in a literary treatment by Julius Zeyer, whose Legend of Erine became the basis of an opera with the same title by Otakar Ostrčil. 

Every composer faces the problem of how to handle musical structure when choosing extramusical subject matter. One must find a balance between the basic principles of musical form and the subject chosen as the work’s content, which could be the description of an emotional event, the telling of a story from a work of literature, or the depiction of a landscape. That Mendelssohn was searching is apparent from the several revisions of The Hebrides. The overture is built in sonata form, but the composer was long dissatisfied with parts of the development that, as he put it, “have a scent more redolent of counterpoint than of fish oil and seagulls, but the opposite should be the case”. The first version was performed in 1832 in London, and the final revision was first heard on 10 January 1833 in Berlin. Coincidentally, it was also heard back then on a programme with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, and Felix Mendelssohn served as both soloist and conductor, performing the work “soulfully, vividly, and perfectly beautifully”.

Ludwig van Beethoven wrote five piano concertos (a sixth remained unfinished). Advancements in piano design enabled him to enrich the solo part with new elements, and he also gave greater depth to the integration of ideas between the individual movements while expanding the harmonic language. The first sketches for the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, date from 1802, at the same time as the sketches for the Eroica Symphony, but his concentrated effort to write the concerto came in the first half of 1806. The work was first heard in March 1807 before a private audience at Prince Lobkowitz’s palace in Vienna. The public premiere took place on 22 December 1808 at the conclusion of the first half of Beethoven’s four-hour benefit concert at the Theater an der Wien, where it was heard along with the concert aria Ah, perfido!, the Fifth Symphony, the Sixth Symphony, part of the Mass in C major, and the Choral Fantasy. This was Beethoven’s last appearance as a piano soloist with orchestra; his worsening deafness prevented him from any more performing.

The concerto opens with the solo piano playing a calm, concentrated chordal idea that serves as a kind of motto for the entire work. It almost sounds like a spontaneous improvisation, a fleeting idea, from which a remarkable structure gradually emerges. The orchestra then takes up the opening motif and builds an exposition from it. When the soloist joins back in, the piano part again seems like an improvisation, but it immediately develops its full brilliance. The second theme alternates between the major and minor modes, and the piano asserts itself ever more strongly, then the dialogue between the soloist and orchestra climaxes with a solo cadenza. The main theme is then heard again, and the orchestra closes the movement. The second movement opens with an energetic unison of the orchestra and with contrasting, hesitant responses by the piano. According to the account of one of Beethoven’s contemporaries, the movement has a programmatic basis; it was meant to evoke the struggle of the legendary figure Orpheus against the underworld. In the rondo third movement, the composer again makes the impression of developing a fleeting idea. The piano part loses its soloistic character and becomes a part of the orchestral score.

Following the success of the first Prague performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, which took place in December 1786 at the Nostitz (Estates) Theater, “a group of great connoisseurs and lovers of music” – as Leopold Mozart wrote to his daughter on 12 January 1787 – invited the composer to Prague. Mozart did indeed come to Prague the following month, saw his Figaro and conducted the performance himself on 22 January 1787. Three days before, on 19 January, he had held a musical academy at the Nostitz Theater, during which he played the piano and performed his Symphony in D major (KV 504), which later became to be known as the Prague Symphony. Mozart scholars are still not agreed on the original purpose for which it was composed, perhaps for the (undocumented) academy in Vienna. This would suggest that Mozart sketched the final movement as early as the spring of 1786, but then set the work in progress aside. Further information about the new symphony is in Mozart’s own list of compositions from early December 1786. Whether the work was completed for a forthcoming trip to Prague or for another occasion, the Prague concert is in any case its first demonstrable performance. The symphony is in three movements, without a dance movement, and even on this point musicologists are not agreed; some believe that Mozart deliberately returned to an earlier type of Italian sinfonia, others claim that during the course of the work he felt the minuet to be too different in style, or that he excluded it because it was no longer “fashionable”, or that the reason was simply the lack of time. The first movement in sonata form begins with a slow introduction, the longest Mozart ever wrote, which foreshadows the overture to Don Giovanni; the allegro section is one of the most beautiful examples of Mozart’s polyphonic artistry, the rhythmical aspect of which is characterized by forward rushing syncopations. The second movement’s quiet, highly chromaticized andante, orchestrated without trumpets and timpani, is also in sonata form and is followed by a buffo finale. Its opening theme is reminiscent of the duet of Susanna and Cherubino from Act II of Le nozze di Figaro, so for the Prague audience it was a reference to a work they knew well. Like in the previous movements, Mozart works only with the main theme in the sonata development. The musicologist Alfred Einstein considered the finale of the Prague Symphony to be “one of those peculiar Mozartian movements that, in spite of seeming joyfulness and perfection, leave a wound in the soul: here, beauty is associated with death.”