Czech Philharmonic • Nathalie Stutzmann

Czech Philharmonic concertmaster Jan Fišer already exhibited his obvious musical talent as a child, winning many competitions (Kocian Violin Competition, Concertino Praga, UNESCO Tribune of Young Musicians, Beethoven’s Hradec etc.). He comes from a musical family, quite literally a family of violinists—his father is one of the most respected violin teachers in this country, and his younger brother Jakub plays first violin in the Bennewitz Quartet. Jan Fišer took his first steps as a violinist under the guidance of Hana Metelková, and he later studied at the Prague Conservatoire under Jaroslav Foltýn. He went through the famed summer programme of the Meadowmount School of Music three times, where he also met his future teacher, the concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Andrés J. Cárdenes. It was in the studio of that important professor who continued the great Ysaÿe–Gingold–Cárdenes tradition of violin pedagogy that Fišer graduated from the Carnegie Mellon University School of Music in Pittsburgh in 2003.

Just when he was deciding whether to remain in the USA or to return to the Czech Republic, the Prague Philharmonia announced an audition for the position of concertmaster. Fišer won the job and stayed with the orchestra for a full sixteen years, until he left the first chair of the Prague Philharmonia for the same position with the Czech Philharmonic, where he remains to this day alongside Jan Mráček and Jiří Vodička. He has also appeared as a guest concertmaster with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony, and the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern; he also collaborates with important Czech orchestras as a soloist (Prague Philharmonia, Janáček Philharmonic in Ostrava etc.). He has assumed the role of artistic director of the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra. 

Besides engaging in a wealth of orchestral and solo activities, he also devotes himself actively to playing chamber music. With pianist Ivo Kahánek and cellist Tomáš Jamník, he belongs to the Dvořák Trio, which has already enjoyed many successes at competitions (such as the Bohuslav Martinů Competition) and on concert stages both at home and abroad. Jan Fišer has appeared at festivals abroad and in famed concert halls worldwide not only as a soloist, but also as a chamber music player. For example, the Dvořák Trio has made guest appearances at the Dresden Music Festival and at renowned concert halls like the Berlin Philharmonie and Hamburg’s Elbephilharmonie.

Fišer’s French violin from the early 19th century is attributed to the violinmaker François-Louis Pique; the instrument has also been heard in recording studios: Jan Fišer records for television and radio, and he was one of the five laureates to take part in recording the CD “A Tribute to Jaroslav Kocian” for the 40th anniversary of the Kocian International Violin Competition. He is also following in his father’s footsteps as a pedagogue, serving as one of the mentors for the MenART scholarship academy, and he regularly teaches at music courses including the Ševčík Academy in Horažďovice and the Telč Music Academy.

Eva Krestová began her musical career as a violinist, studying first at the conservatoires in Brno and Prague, then graduating from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague under the guidance of Jindřich Pazdera. Already as a student, she had a passion for playing chamber music, and she perfected her skills in that discipline under such members of renowned ensembles as Niklas Schmidt (Trio Fontenay), Jerry Horner (Fine Arts Quartet), and Ivan Klánský (Guarneri Trio Prague). She was known to us as a violinist first with the Puella Trio, which she later left to begin her career in the world-famous Pavel Haas Quartet. During four years of playing second violin in that quartet, she appeared in the world’s most famous concert halls (Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, Herkulessaal), and she won a Gramophone Award.

However, it was necessary to move on, and another path appeared very quickly on the viola. “Back then, my husband [violinist Radim Kresta] was playing in a piano trio, and he came up with something of an idea. Once he brought a violin home from a luthier, and he said: ‘Come play in a piano quartet with us!’ … I tried playing the viola, first for a few minutes, then for an hour, and suddenly I found that I couldn’t stop”, says Eva Krestová. She was entirely intoxicated by the instrument that she says has “more breadth of soul” than the violin. At first she was making appearances at the same time as both a violinist and a violist, but now she seldom plays the violin. This was also aided by her professional engagements, first for two seasons with the Prague Philharmonia, then for a year at Prague’s National Theatre. From there, her path took her to the position of principal violist of the Czech Philharmonic, where she has been working since 2021.

The story of her discovery of the viola has also played an important part in the world of chamber music. The Josef Suk Piano Quartet was formed under the leadership of Radim Kresta, and the group has enjoyed many successes at international competitions, the most important being their victory at the ACM Premio Trio di Trieste in Italy. They have been performing with success for more than a decade at domestic and foreign festivals, and they were honoured with the 2013 Czech Chamber Music Society Award. 

Besides playing in orchestras and chamber music and raising a family (two children), Eva Krestová also makes occasional solo appearances. Her partners have been, for example, Virtuosi Italiani, the Prague Philharmonia, the Pilsen Philharmonic, and the Moravian Chamber Orchestra, of which she was the concertmaster for several years while studying at the conservatoire. Her playing in chamber ensembles has been captured on a number of recordings (Supraphon, Arco diva); she has also recorded for the BBC, the Japanese television network NHK, and Czech Television.

The French conductor Nathalie Stutzmann, who recently enjoyed incredible success at the Bayreuth Festival and the Metropolitan Opera, appeared on the music scene in 1985 as a singer, but singing was just one of the possible ways for her to realise a musical career. She also played piano, bassoon, and cello, and although she had learned the fundamentals of conducting at an early age, a career as a conductor was closed to her at the time. As she explains, society was not yet ready for female conductors back then. She did not give up her dream, however, and meanwhile she took full advantage of all the lucrative offers to perform as a singer and of the acclaim she was receiving thanks to the unique quality of her voice.

Although the door is now open to women conductors, the phenomenon is still viewed as something rather unusual. She is constantly promoted as “the first woman at the helm of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra” or “the second woman in history to lead a major American orchestra”. However, she does not see being a “woman conductor” as what makes her different; instead, she credits the breadth of her musical background. “I started with piano, and with piano you develop your harmonic ear. As a bassoon player, you develop your breathing and knowledge about those needs. As a cello player, you develop knowledge about the bow. As a Baroque singer, you develop the liberty of interpretation”, she explains.

She is now in her third year as music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, with which she has enjoyed cordial collaboration from the beginning. Last season, she and the orchestra toured the West Coast of the USA. In that country, she often appears leading the Philadelphia Orchestra, where she is the principal guest conductor, and it was also with them that in the 2023/24 season she made her conducting debut at Carnegie Hall in repertoire by Mozart and Schumann. In addition, she often travels to Europe, last season mainly to the Philharmonie de Paris, where she appeared several times, but also to famed opera houses. She achieved great success performing Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Bayreuth Festival in the summer of 2023, followed by The Flying Dutchman at the Teatro Regio Torino. Her conducting of productions of The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni at New York’s Metropolitan Opera was also received very positively.

On today’s programme, this member of the Ordre national de la de la Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honour, will present music by Mozart; critics have acclaimed her careful readings of that composer’s works. The case is similar with Tchaikovsky’s great symphonies—in recent seasons, she has conducted his Sixth Symphony in Europe and the USA, for example with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, and “her own” Philadelphians. 

The winner of the Opus Klassik prize for the “Concert Recording of the Year 2023”, she has signed an exclusive contract with the Warner Classics/Erato label. Besides the harp concertos for which she received the prize mentioned above, she has also released Beethoven’s complete piano concertos (Haochen Zhang and the Philadelphia Orchestra).

In the Baroque era, composers began employing the individual character and specific sonic and technical properties of particular instruments in the context of orchestral sound. Technical improvements of instruments also opened up new possibilities. The solo concerto with orchestral accompaniment emerged, leading to the cult of the virtuoso. An intermediate stage was the sinfonia concertante, in which solo parts (as in the baroque concerto grosso) remain part of the orchestra, but a solo (concertante) role is assigned to them within that framework.

Two of the best known compositions in the sinfonia concertante genre are by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and both are in E flat major. In the first (K 297b), composed in the spring of 1778 in Paris, four wind instruments play the solo parts: oboe, clarinet, French horn, and bassoon. The Sinfonia concertante in E flat major for violin, viola, and orchestra, as it was titled in the first edition, was composed in the summer of 1779 in Salzburg. Mozart’s third work in the genre (in A major) was to have featured three solo instruments: violin, viola, and cello. It was probably being composed at the same time as its predecessor, but it remained unfinished.

Only a fragment of the autograph of the Sinfonia concertante in E flat major, K 364, has been preserved (the cadenzas in the second and third movement are authentic, for example), so copies of various provenience represent important sources. The composition’s character exhibits the influence of the Mannheim school, including its favoured dotted rhythms and the effective use of crescendos. The way Mozart displays the solo instruments against the orchestral background is proof his masterful feeling for details of timbre. One curious feature is the use of scordatura tuning for the solo viola, with the instrument’s pitch raised by a semitone to prevent its less-than-penetrating sound from being diluted by the tutti viola parts of the orchestra, which employs pairs of oboes and French horns along with a full string section.

In May 1892, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky moved to Klin, a town near Moscow that became his last place of residence. For years, the composer had been hesitant to appear in public, but towards the end of his life he was travelling all over Europe, driven by a strange restlessness; in 1892 alone, he made journeys to Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Basel, Paris, Brussels, London, and Cambridge (where he received an honorary doctorate). In Prague, he took part in the final rehearsals at the National Theatre for his opera The Queen of Spades. Adolf Čech, the theatre’s kapellmeister, conducted the premiere of the production on 11 October, the first time the work had been performed beyond Russia’s borders, and the public gave an enthusiastic welcome to the composer, who was in attendance. He enjoyed triumphs elsewhere as well, but he still wrote to his brother Modest: “I have to regain confidence in myself; it’s horrible, but I feel that I have played myself out…”.

Less than a year later, his words were strangely borne out. Speculation persists to this day about the end of Tchaikovsky’s life, and his Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, known as the “Pathétique”, also plays a part in various hypotheses. It is dedicated to the composer’s nephew Vladimir Davydov, to whom he confided: “It will be a kind of programmatic symphony, but the programme shall remain a secret – let them guess... It is a purely subjective programme [...] The form will be novel in many ways, especially in the finale, which will not be a noisy allegro, but instead a long, drawn-out adagio.” The symphony was finished in July 1893 in Klin, and on 28 October (Old Style) of that year, it was premiered in Saint Petersburg without the sobriquet that Modest Tchaikovsky later gave it. The symphony got a puzzled reception, but the composer had expected this. The work’s autographical features are undeniable, but there is no basis in reality for romanticised interpretations about premonitions of death, an artistic last will and testament, or anything of the kind. Several novels based on the story have helped spread such ideas. In any case, Tchaikovsky’s final symphony did turn out to be his last will. His sudden death a week after the premiere has been attributed to an acute case of cholera, and this too has given free rein to fanciful stories: crushed by his symphony’s failure, the composer supposedly infected himself deliberately with tainted water. However, according to Modest, his brother was full of plans during the last days before his death, and his mental state was balanced. Around the year 1905, rumours began to spread of a secret verdict of a court of honour ordering Tchaikovsky to commit suicide to purge the shame of his homosexual encounters. Such “sensational discoveries” re-emerge from time to time in newly constructed forms, but convincing evidence is lacking.

The Pathétique Symphony is unfailingly effective thanks to its innovative form, something of which the composer was aware: he had dispensed with the usual ordering of a symphonic cycle, in particular by putting a slow movement (marked lamentoso) at the conclusion, as he had written to his nephew. The impression of the work’s denouement thus entirely outweighs the power and lyricism of the first movement, the gracefulness of the second, and the lively march of the third. The work’s concrete “programme” remained the composer’s secret.