Czech Philharmonic • Kristian Bezuidenhout

In addition to conducting at Prague’s Rudolfinum, Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic in the 2023/2024 season, took the all Dvořák programmes to Korea and across Japan with three concerts at Tokyo’s famed Suntory Hall. In spring, an extensive European tour took the programmes to Spain, Austria, Germany, Belgium, and France and, at the end of year, the Year of Czech Music 2024 will culminate with three concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York. 

Among the significant joint achievements of Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic is the release of a 7-CD box set devoted to Tchaikovsky’s symphonic repertoire and a series of international residencies. In 2024, Semjon Byčkov with the Czech Philharmonic concentrated on recording Czech music – a CD was released with Bedřich Smetanaʼs My Homeland and Antonín Dvořákʼs last three symphonies and ouvertures.

Bychkovʼs repertoire spans four centuries. His highly anticipated performances are a unique combination of innate musicality and rigorous Russian pedagogy. In addition to guest engagements with the world’s major orchestras and opera houses, Bychkov holds honorary titles with the BBC Symphony Orchestra – with whom he appears annually at the BBC Proms – and the Royal Academy of Music, who awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in July 2022. Bychkov was named “Conductor of the Year” by the International Opera Awards in 2015 and, by Musical America in 2022.

Bychkov began recording in 1986 and released discs with the Berlin Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio, Royal Concertgebouw, Philharmonia Orchestra and London Philharmonic for Philips. Subsequently a series of benchmark recordings with WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne featured Brahms, Mahler, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Strauss, Verdi, Glanert and Höller. Bychkov’s 1993 recording of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin with the Orchestre de Paris continues to win awards, most recently the Gramophone Collection 2021; Wagner’s Lohengrin was BBC Music Magazine’s Record of the Year (2010); and Schmidt’s Symphony No. 2 with the Vienna Philharmonic was BBC Music Magazine’s Record of the Month (2018).

Semyon Bychkov has one foot firmly in the culture of the East and the other in the West. Born in St Petersburg in 1952, he studied at the Leningrad Conservatory with the legendary Ilya Musin. Denied his prize of conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic, Bychkov emigrated to the United States in 1975 and, has lived in Europe since the mid-1980’s. In 1989, the same year he was named Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, Bychkov returned to the former Soviet Union as the St Petersburg Philharmonic’s Principal Guest Conductor. He was appointed Chief Conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra (1997) and Chief Conductor of Dresden Semperoper (1998).

A performer who is capable of alternating between several different fortepianos built by a variety of instrument makers during a single recital; a pianist who has no problem with playing a modern piano at one concert, a fortepiano at the next, and a harpsichord soon afterwards; an artist who often even conducts from the keyboard and who does all of these things to maximise the realisation of his interpretive intentions. This is Kristian Bezuidenhout, artistic director of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the English Concert, whose domain is the repertoire of the 18th and early 19th centuries.

He won international fame mainly thanks to winning the Bruges Fortepiano Competition at 21 years of age. However, unlike some of his artistic colleagues, Bezuidenhout was not caught off guard by the career of an artist travelling around the world—he was already alternating between four continents. Born in South Africa, he began his musical studies in Australia and completed them in New York (Eastman School of Music); he now lives in London. He has won acclaim mainly as a player of historical instruments, although as a performer of early music, he avoids expressions like “authentic interpretation”, preferring the phrase “historically inspired”. He makes no attempt at historical “purism”; his goal is to be authentic to his own interpretive path, which he says he achieves better in most cases on historical instruments. And because every composition requires something a bit different, he does not hesitate even to use several different historical instruments at a single concert.

Besides in solo recitals, he is often heard as a soloist with top ensembles specialising in early music such as Les Arts Florissants or the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; with some other ensembles (Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century etc.), he likes to conduct from the piano as well. Combining the roles of soloist and conductor allows him maximum immersion not only in the solo part, but also in the score as a whole. He does not hesitate to share with listeners his comprehensive ideas about music of the 18th century and its interpretation in many interviews and educational videos.

His conscientious approach to interpretation is also reflected in such series of recordings as the complete cycle of piano concertos by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Mozart (ECHO Klassik) recorded with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. Bezuidenhout has devoted himself to Mozart with great intensity for a number of years. For the Harmonia Mundi label, he recorded W. A Mozart’s complete mature solo works for the fortepiano (works for harpsichord dating from Mozart’s childhood were not included). That project not only earned him the Wiener Flötenuhr, a Viennese prize for Mozart recordings, but also was honoured with the Diapason d’Or. Besides performing the Viennese classics, he also sometimes explores repertoire of earlier (Bach’s sonatas for violin and harpsichord, which he has recorded with Isabelle Faust) or later periods (Schubert’s Winterreise with Mark Padmore).

When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K 503, did he realise that listeners were unprepared for his conception of the concerto genre and that the work would spend a full 147 years on its journey back to the concert stage? The composer performed the concerto in Vienna on 5 December 1786, a day after its completion, then the following year he repeated his performance and also played the concerto in Leipzig. After that, it was not heard again at a concert until 1934, when Artur Schnabel played the solo part with the Vienna Philharmonic led by George Szell. It took another ten years for the work to solidify its place in the piano repertoire, and it has come to be viewed entirely differently—we now regard it as one of Mozart’s most magnificent works, paving the way in the genre not only for Beethoven, but also for the whole 19th century. The Czech Philharmonic recorded this concerto in 1974 on the Supraphon label with the legendary Mozart interpreter Ivan Moravec under the baton of Josef Vlach.

Mozart began devoting himself to the piano concerto genre at around age 20, modelling works after known examples by Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715–1777), who was active in Vienna, and Johann Christian Bach (the “London Bach”, 1735–1782). During his years of success from 1784 to 1786, when he wrote 12 piano concertos numbered among his masterpieces, he engaged in polemics with his predecessors on the pages of his scores, advancing the genre beyond merely entertaining, pleasingly predictable pieces for high society. He often composed with himself in mind as the performer, he took more notice of the colours of the instrumental sections, and his content reached surprising depths, where even complex counterpoint flows along in the currents.

In his Piano Concerto No. 25, Mozart truly broke new ground, and for the purpose he chose the heroically triumphant key of C major to avail himself of the brilliance of trumpets and timpani (whilst foregoing his beloved clarinets). The work exhibits perfect unity in diversity and is unusually symphonic and polyphonic for its day, especially in the opening Allegro maestoso, where we witness many contrasts of expression. In the middle section, the composer seems to have a premonition of the melody of the Marseillaise, which was not written until 1792, nearly six years after the concerto was finished. The slow movement that follows is an echo of the lovely tenderness of Mozart’s operatic duets, with the piano engaging in a heartfelt dialogue mainly with the wind instruments. The concluding rondo Allegretto begins with a dance theme from the composer’s opera Idomeneo. Although serious ideas are concealed beneath the typically exciting Mozartian energy, the concerto proceeds optimistically. The concerto’s exceptional craftsmanship is worthy of comparison to Mozart’s very last symphonic work, the Symphony No. 41 in C major “Jupiter”, K 551 (1788). 

The works of Gustav Mahler are inseparable from his relationship with nature. He needed nature and sought it out, expecting it to provide him with “the basic themes and rhythms of his art”, and he compared himself with a musical instrument played by “the spirit of the world, the source of all being.” Just by looking at photographs of the places where he drew energy for composing, we can hardly avoid the impression that there is an intrinsic link between those natural surroundings and the composer’s music. Practical reasons also played a part; Mahler the conductor, always more than 100% devoted his work, could only find the peace and concentration he needed for composing during the summer holiday.

The composer began writing his Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1901 in the Austrian village Maiernigg beside Lake Wörth (Wörthersee), where he had a villa built along with a “hermit’s hut” for composing. By then, he was already in his fifth year at the helm of one of Europe’s most prestigious cultural institutions, the Court Opera in Vienna. This time, however, besides rest, he also needed to recover his health; in February he had nearly died of severe hemorrhoidal bleeding, and his life was saved by a prompt surgical procedure: “As I wavered at the boundary between life and death, I was wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to be done with it right away because everyone ends up there eventually”, he wrote later on.

Death seems to have been at Mahler’s heels from his childhood—seven of his twelve younger siblings did not live to the age of two, his brother Ernst died at age 13, and in 1895 Otto committed suicide at the age of 21. Four years later, the composer buried both of his parents and his younger sister Poldi. Thus, we are not surprised by the unusual number of funeral marches in his works, nor is this the first time that entirely contrasting music came into being in an idyllic environment: the last song of the collection The Youth’s Magic Horn titled The Drummer Boy, three of his Kindertotenlieder, four more songs to texts by Rückert, and the first two movements of a new symphony. “Their content is terribly sad, and I suffered greatly having to write them; I also suffer at the thought that the world shall have to listen to them one day”, he told his devoted friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner (1858–1921). About his symphony, he further noted that it would be “in accordance with all rules, in four movements, each being independent and self-contained, held together only by a similar mood.” Bach’s counterpoint became another important source of inspiration: “Bach contains all of life in its embryonic forms, united as the world is in God. There exists no mightier counterpoint”, he declared; he was spending up to several hours a day studying polyphony.

Suddenly, however, the composer’s life faced a disruption on a cosmic scale. Who knows how the symphony might have turned out if on 7 November 1901 he had not made the acquaintance of an enchanting, musically talented, and undoubtedly very charismatic woman named Alma Schindler (1879–1964) at a friendly gathering. She instantly won over Gustav with her directness, and she wrote in her diary: “That fellow is made of pure oxygen. Whoever gets close to him will burn up.” They were betrothed in December, Alma became pregnant in January, and the wedding took place on 9 March 1902 at Vienna’s Karlskirche in the presence of a small group of family and friends. The couple then embarked on a happy yet complicated period of their lives…

That summer in Maiernigg, Mahler composed the song Liebst du um Schönheit (If you love for beauty) for his wife, and he inserted into his Fifth Symphony one of his most intense and popular slow movements, the Adagietto. The symphony’s premiere took place on 18 October 1904 in Cologne under the composer’s baton. Audience members whistled at the concert to show their disapproval, and as an example of one of the many negative reviews, we can quote Hermann Kipper, according to whom the first movement was too long and the second movement contained many “unmusical” passages full of “appalling cacophony”; according to him, the composer’s brain “finds itself in a constant state of confusion.” After the premiere, Mahler commented laconically: “No one understood it. I wish I could conduct the premiere 50 years after my death.” The symphony was again unsuccessful the following year at performances in Dresden, Berlin, and Prague, where it was played on 2 March 1905 by the orchestra of the New German Theatre (now the State Opera) led by the composer and conductor Leo Blech (1871–1958). The symphony got its first truly warm reception on American soil on 24 March 1905, when Frank Van der Stucken conducted the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Performances followed in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, making Mahler’s music increasingly familiar in American circles before the composer himself came there in 1907.

Within the composer’s oeuvre, the Fifth Symphony represents a turning point. Although there continue to be thematic connections with his songs, we no longer find a vocal component in Mahler’s orchestral works with the exceptions of the Eighth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde. Part I of the approximately 60-minute work consists of two dark, gloomy movements. First, we hear the famous trumpet fanfare announcing death and ushering in a funeral march. The calm, slow motion illuminated by the woodwinds playing a theme in the major mode is disrupted by a wildly dramatic section. Heaviness and dense orchestral sound alternate with introspective passages that reflect upon feelings of loss. The music extinguishes itself nearly in a state of despair, whereupon the next movement breaks forth vehemently (Moving stormily), in which a cantabile theme later appears, accompanied by sobbing winds. The two main ideas are later merged into a triumphant stream of brass, but once again the music leads us back into a state of tense anxiety.

Part II of the symphony consists Mahler’s vast Scherzo. Despite the music’s dance-like character and the absence of the composer’s usual irony, shadows of sadness, again entrusted to the winds, flit past us in this movement as well. Part III of the symphony opens with the intimate Adagietto for strings, made especially famous by Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice. The soothing music seems to disperse any the clouds of distress. Then in the bucolic, unrestrained finale, the composer broadly develops several themes, the third of which then leads to a magnificent brass chorale.