Czech Philharmonic • Christian Immler

Starting as an alto in the Tölzer Knabenchor, the German bass-baritone Christian Immler has become a versatile artist, today applauded at prestigious concert halls and theatres worldwide. With a voice of “warm, noble timbre and great flexibility” (Forum Opéra), he is widely known as a splendid performer of Baroque and early-Classical music, with his repertoire also encompassing 19-century and contemporary chamber and orchestral pieces, songs, oratorios and operas. He is a distinguished teacher too.  

Christian Immler studied voice at the Guildhall School of Music (with Rudolf Piernay), and is currently completing his musicology doctorate at Royal Holloway College in London. He launched his international career by winning the Concours international de Chant-Piano Nadia et Lili Boulanger in Paris, whereupon he was invited to appear with renowned orchestras (BBC Symphony Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester, Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest, etc.), at major concert venues (Wigmore Hall, Philharmonie de Paris, Mozarteum in Salzburg, etc.) and  opera houses (Opéra Comique in Paris , Grand Théâtre de Genève, etc.).

Over the long term, he has closely collaborated with the pianist Helmut Deutsch. Their albums Modern Times and Hidden Treasure have garnered great critical acclaim (Diamant dʼOpéra and Diapason Découverte). This year, they will release a recording of Robert Gund’s and Wilhelm Grosz’s songs, reflecting Immler’s penchant for exiled 20th-century composers.

Christian Immler is familiar to Czech music lovers too. In 2022, he gave two performances in Prague, first dazzling as Pilate in J. S. Bach’s St John Passion, opposite Collegium 1704 at the Rudolfinum, and then excelling in the world premiere of Detlev Glanert’s Symphony No. 4 (Prager Sinfonie), next to the mezzo-soprano Catriona Morison and the Czech Philharmonic, conducted by Semyon Bychkov. The concert was well received by the critics, who lauded the piece and the performers alike, highlighting the soloists’ “cultivated, well-balanced dramatic expression and emotionally charged work with the text” (Petr Veber, KlasikaPlus.cz). Morison and Immler would subsequently perform Glanert’s symphony with the Czech Philharmonic under Bychkov in Leipzig and Amsterdam. In an interview, Immler praised the local orchestras, yet added that the Czech Philharmonic was “simply… the best”. 

In the current season, Immler will appear with the Czech Philharmonic on two occasions. Besides this concert, featuring Glanert’s music, he will render the bass part in a performance of Bach’s Mass in B minor, which he sang on Marc Minkowski’s much-discussed album. By the way, Immler is also familiar with the alto part, which he recorded back in his childhood.

One of the great masters of the music of the German tradition, Marek Janowski is recognised throughout the world for his interpretation of Wagner, Strauss, Bruckner, Brahms, Hindemith and the Second Viennese School, and has an extensive and distinguished discography in this repertoire. His Wagner opera cycle with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin was held to have set a new standard of performance in concertante opera. BBC Music Magazine called the live recording on Pentatone “the sound of a Ring for the 21st century“.

Marek Janowski enjoys an outstanding reputation amongst the premier orchestras across the globe and regularly works with orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Oslo Philharmonic, NHK Symphony Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony amongst others. Lauded for his ability to create orchestras of international standing, he has been further sought after as Music Director and Chief Conductor. Most recently, he was Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra (2019–2023, 2001–2003). Previously, he served as Artistic Director of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and as Music Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo. As Music Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Marek Janowski took the orchestra to a position of pre-eminence in France as well as abroad. 

Born in Warsaw and educated in Germany, Marek Janowski’s artistic path led him from Assistant positions in Aachen, Cologne, Düsseldorf and Hamburg to his appointment as General Music Director in Freiburg im Breisgau (1973–1975) and then in Dortmund (1975–1979). Whilst in Dortmund, his reputation grew rapidly, and he was invited to conduct in many of Europe’s leading opera houses. He has been a regular guest at every world-renowned opera house since the late 1970s, from the Metropolitan Opera New York to the Bayerische Staatsoper Munich; from Chicago and San Francisco to Hamburg; from Vienna and Berlin to Paris. From the 1990s on, Janowski began to concentrate on the great German symphonic repertoire for which he enjoys an outstanding reputation.

Janowski’s distinguished discography, built over the past 40 years, includes the iconic recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle with the Staatskapelle Dresden (1980–1983). It also includes many award-winning recordings of complete opera and symphonic cycles, such as his complete Bruckner Symphonies with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, recorded for Pentatone. Further acclaimed releases on Pentatone include Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (Lise Davidsen, Andreas Schager and Frankfurt Radio Symphony with MDR Rundfunkchor Leipzig), Beethoven Symphonies Nos 5 & 6 with WDR Symphony Orchestra, Schubert’s Unfinished and Great symphonies with the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra and Verdi’s Un ballo in Maschera with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, the Transylvania State Philharmonic Choir, and a stellar cast, headed by Freddie De Tommaso, Lester Lynch and Saioa Hernández.

When Johannes Brahms was composing his Symphony No. 2 in D major, he was in the midst of his creative life, while his Four Serious Songs came nearly at the end. What could be more contrasting than a “serious” composition and one like Brahms’s Second Symphony that is sometimes described as “pastoral”? And yet the symphony is not the product of a youth starting his career, but rather a work by a man already long famous for his German Requiem, Op. 45, a composition of profound intellectual depth. It is understandable that Brahms was posing existential questions in his late songs, but we understand all the same that he needed to grow into symphonic composing. Therefore, the gulf separating the two contrasting compositions is not as wide as it might seem.

Before Brahms settled in Vienna permanently in late 1871, he had already visited the Austrian capital, and his curriculum vitae reflected a diversity of experiences. Born in Hamburg, he got his first musical training at home (his father made a living as a town musician). Thanks to his teachers Otto Friedrich W. Cossel and Eduard Marxsen, he perfected his craft as a pianist and composer, performed in public, composed, and travelled. He was fortunate to have had talented and inspiring friends like the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi, his senior by a few years, the violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim, a graduate of the conservatoire in Vienna, and the married couple Robert and Clara Schumann. He got to know Göttingen, Hannover, Weimar, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Leipzig… And his love of travel never left him. Friendship with the Schumann family was especially meaningful for Brahms, and its importance lasted long past the death of Robert Schumann in 1856. Despite all his emotional and professional ties to Hamburg or to Baden-Baden, where Clara and her children were living from 1863 to 1873, Brahms led something of a nomadic existence. Even after having finally settled in Vienna, he enjoyed travelling over the summer holidays or going on journeys to Italy. Speaking of the 1870s, when Brahms wrote his Symphony No. 2, we cannot fail to mention his part in awarding a stipend to support Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) and the start of their friendship. Brahms then spent the 1880s and ’90s as a distinguished composer, pianist, and conductor honoured with various awards and titles.

Our concert programme is not in chronological order; instead it begins with the Four Serious Songs (Vier ernste Gesänge), originally composed for bass with piano accompaniment. It is Brahms’s final work (Op. 121), dated to 1896, when it was composed (completed in May), published (July), and publicly premiered (9 November). Getting back to Antonín Dvořák, at the end of November 1896, he asked the publisher Fritz Simrock in Berlin to send him the edition of Brahms’s cycle, writing that “everyone is talking about the great beauty of these songs, and I don’t know them yet.” Everything now seemed to be speeding up: time ran out for Clara Schumann, who died in the spring of 1896, and Brahms’s own life was moving swiftly towards its end, his last year (1897) being marked by incurable illness. Against this background, we are not surprised by the composer’s choice of texts: quotes from Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible, specifically from Ecclesiastes, Sirach, and Paul the Apostle’s First Epistle to the Corinthians – the famous 13th chapter that extols love above faith and hope. Whatever relationship Brahms may have had with religion and especially with its institutionalised form, his Four Serious Songs touch upon general, basic themes of human life with great honesty.

Song cycles constitute an important part of Johannes Brahms’s oeuvre starting already with early opuses from the beginning of the 1850s. In total, he wrote over 300 songs with piano accompaniment, and he took an interest in both folk songs and the works of German poets (writing musical settings, for example, of verses by Friedrich Rückert, Joseph von Eichendorff, texts from the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and much more). Brahms’s preoccupation with the other arts can also be seen from the dedication of his Four Serious Songs to the symbolist painter, graphic artist, and amateur pianist Max Klinger, whose father had died recently. And for his part, Klinger had already expressed his admiration for the composer in his Brahms-Phantasie, a cycle of graphic prints combining images with Brahms’s musical scores (1894). The songs were premiered in Vienna in the composer’s presence by two artists from the Netherlands—the baritone Anton Sistermans and the still very young pianist Coenraad V. Bos. The introverted songs proceed from minor keys to the final section in E flat major, which after all comes across more optimistically than, for example, the third song O Tod, wie bitter bist du. 

The beauty of Brahms’s Opus 121 has inspired various arrangements such as a piano transcription by Max Reger (1912) and an orchestral version by Malcolm Sargent (1944). The orchestral arrangement by Detlev Glanert (* 1960, Hamburg) on today’s programme could be called a sensitive completion of Brahms’s work by the addition of four preludes and a postlude. The individual songs are thus joined into a single whole, respecting Brahms’s original work whilst also drawing from the resources of modern musical thought. Glanert, as is clear from his biography, has had plenty of experience with arranging the works of other composers, whether of the Classical (Beethoven), Romantic (Schubert, Schumann), Post-Romantic (Mahler), or earlier periods (Isaak, Scarlatti). The exceptional nature of this adaptation is expressed by the title Vier Präludien und Ernste Gesänge (2004/2005), which we can encounter on concert programmes.

Contrasting with the large quantity of songs, Johannes Brahms wrote only four symphonies. The First Symphony (C minor, Op. 68) had a long gestation period, with sketches for the first movement dating back to the 1860s, but the composer was still making changes to it in 1877 after its first public performances. It was well received everywhere except perhaps in Munich, and in many cases there was also an awareness that in the work Brahms was continuing the legacy of the great symphonies of the Classical era and especially of Ludwig van Beethoven. It was not without reason that the conductor Hans von Bülow called it “Beethoven’s Tenth”. A synthesis of Classicism and Romanticism also characterises Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, which he composed swiftly, immediately on the heels of the First Symphony. Brahms began writing it in the summer of 1877 while staying in the Carinthian town Pörtschach, and by the end of the year it had already been performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Hans Richter. 

The Second Symphony is often seen as a joyous work, lyrical, bucolic, and unusually sunny in the context of Brahms’s music. Whether the composer meant his remarks seriously or ironically, he called the work an expression of his melancholy spirit, almost unbearable for both performers and listeners. In truth, the symphony is not straightforwardly jubilant, and it conceals no lack of shadows, with the composer’s inner turmoil seeming to rise from beneath the surface of idyllic inspiration from nature. Frequent key changes, a large brass section (four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, and tuba), and contrapuntal resources all highlight an ambiguity that makes the work’s character all the more celebratory and monumental. From the exceptionally extensive first movement (Allegro non troppo) in sonata form, we proceed to a serious and very moving Adagio non troppo and a graceful menuet as the third movement (Allegretto grazioso quasi andantino), and then onwards to the finale (Allegro con spirito), again in sonata form. Unified by a basic three-note motif, thoughtfully structured, and given a special atmosphere by its masterful orchestration, Brahms’s Second Symphony is today a popular work in the repertoire of the world’s leading orchestras.