Czech Philharmonic • Giovanni Antonini

Magdalena Kožená, Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, is one of the most successful Czech singers of today. Although she now lives in Berlin, she often comes back to the Czech Republic to join the Czech Philharmonic, either together with her husband Simon Rattle or for a concert on her own, this time conducted by Giovanni Antonini. She has collaborated with this conductor for a long time, appearing, inter alia, in the Classical repertoire. In 2006 she went on tour with Antonini’s ensemble Il Giardino Armonico; in 2019 her performance in the program with Mozart and Gluck arias with Antonini and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment was a great success.

Kožená was born in Brno, where she attended the Brno Philharmonic Children’s Choir Kantiléna which (according to her own words) shaped her not only as a musician but also as a human being, and she also began piano lessons. After graduating from the Brno Conservatory and the Bratislava Academy of Performing Arts, she began to collaborate with local ensembles specializing in early music. The impulse to cross over the border of Baroque music, which also opened the door for her to the international music world, came in 1995 when she won the prestigious W. A. Mozart International Competition in Salzburg. Another milestone was her exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon, which presented a crucial opportunity for Kožená to get acquainted with the leading musical figures. Since then, she has released a number of recordings of various repertoire (including Czech music), for which she has been awarded major prizes (Gramophone Award, Echo Klassik, Diapason d’Or, etc.).

Kožená has given recitals in the world’s most prestigious concert halls, such as Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, Concergebouw Amsterdam, etc., has worked with Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and other renowned conductors, and has also devoted herself to opera (regular guest appearances at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Berlin’s Staatsoper, etc.). On top of that, she has also performed in the sphere of “non-artificial” (natural) music such as swing and flamenco. Also impressive is the breadth of her classical repertoire, which ranges from Baroque music and collaboration with early music ensembles, the Classical and Romantic repertoire, for which she has become known, inter alia, as a promoter of Czech music, to contemporary music. However, she does not forget about living in the non-musical world either, because, as she says, “I sing stories about what happens in life, and if I didn’t experience any of that – motherhood, for example – I would feel that I had nothing to convey to the audience.”

A native of Milan, Giovanni Antonini has long been acclaimed worldwide for his innovative and polished approach to performing the Baroque and Classical repertoire while fully respecting the precepts of historically informed interpretation. However, the path of early music had not been his first choice of study. He had originally applied to the conservatoire as a violinist, and it was only because he did not succeed at his audition that he ultimately began studying the recorder, and he became a master of the instrument. It was thanks to his study of the flute at the Civica Scuola di Musica that Antonini fully discovered the world of Baroque music. In addition, as he himself recalls, it was a great advantage that as a flautist specialising in historical interpretation, he did not have many artistic models to rely on and simply imitate (after all, in the 1980s the field was still in its infancy), so he had to seek out his own interpretive approaches. He found further support in his studies at the Centre de Musique Ancienne in Geneva, but the urge never abandoned him to penetrate truly deeply into the music and to create his own language, which is now so appreciated for its uniqueness.

In 1985 he founded his own Baroque ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, with which he still appears all around the world in the dual role of soloist (whether on the recorder or the Baroque transverse flute) and conductor. Overall, perhaps the most ambitious project he threw himself into a few years back with the Basel Chamber Orchestra was to record the complete symphonies of Haydn, and to finish by the year 2032, the 300th anniversary of the composer’s birth. The project Haydn2032, of which Antonini is the artistic director, is daring not only for its scope (Haydn wrote 108 Symphonies, so it is necessary to release 2 CDs with three or four symphonies every year!), but also because of the interpretive difficulties of Haydn’s music. “Haydn is very difficult to perform well because many of the interpretive paths can sound boring. But Haydn is not boring, it’s just the matter of finding the key to the correct interpretation,” explains Antonini. So far, 14 CDs have appeared (most recently this September), so the Haydn symphonic repertoire he has already recorded, rehearsed, or prepared has also influenced the programming of Antonini’s concerts in recent years.

Of course, Antonini does not overlook other greats masters of the 16th through the 18th centuries, whose works he has recorded with Il Gardino Armonico (including the Vivaldi concerto on today’s programme) or performed in concert with such major orchestras as the Berlin Philharmonic, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra and with renowned soloists like Cecilia Bartoli, Giuliano Carmignola, Isabelle Faust, and Katia and Marielle Labèque. He also devotes himself to opera; in recent years, for example, we have been able to see him at Milan’s La Scala (Giulio Cesare), the Zurich Opera House (Idomeneo), and the Theater an der Wien (Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo). He is also the artistic director of the Polish music festival Wratislavia Cantans and the principal guest conductor of the Basel Chamber Orchestra.

On today’s programme, Josef Mysliveček joins with the three most famous composers of Viennese Classicism, and that is company to which the son of a successful Prague miller rightfully belongs. Mysliveček had been yearning for a musical career from childhood, but at first he complied with his father’s wishes and continued working in the family trade. In the end, however, the call of music was more powerful. Mysliveček’s attention was drawn to Italian opera, so the talented 26-year-old violinist and novice composer left Prague and departed for Venice.

The Italians may have had difficulty with pronouncing Mysliveček’s surname, but “Il boemo” (“The Bohemian”, as he came to be known) won their favour very quickly. Opera seria became central to his output; in all, he wrote over twenty of these serious, dramatic works often based on subject matter from antiquity or mythology. Within just a few years, Mysliveček’s music conquered all the Italian opera centres of the era including Venice, Naples, Milan, and Rome, and the best singers of the day performed the main roles in his operas.

Mysliveček’s life was not very long, and his final years were marred by the progression of an illness, probably syphilis, that resulted in his social isolation and a worsening financial situation. Nonetheless, he continued devoting himself to composing, and just three years before his death he wrote one of his finest works, the opera L’Olimpiade. The rather untraditional subject matter deals with a tangled love polygon set against the background of the Olympic Games. The libretto offers a colourful wealth of emotions that Mysliveček set to music with exceptional sensitivity, taking into account the tastes of the Neapolitan public at the Teatro San Carlo, for which L’Olimpiade was commissioned.

Princess Argene, who is in disguise, is among those appearing at the venue of the Olympic Games. Her fiancé Licida has abandoned her to be able to compete in the games a for victory that would win him the hand of Princess Aristea. Licida wins, and Argene, despite having set out after Licida because of love, feels betrayed and vents her feelings of rage: “Did he not swear to all of the gods? How could he break the promise he made to me? Thus is my love to be rewarded?” The fast tempo, the three-part form with a short, a seemingly contrasting middle section, dynamic contrasts, a virtuosic vocal line with many ornaments and a wide range, and the pulsating instrumental accompaniment with short note values and strong accents as if to symbolise indignation coming from deep within the character—these are all typical traits of a “Furioso aria” and are inextricably linked to opera seria, a genre mastered to absolute perfection by the miller’s son from the other side of the Alps. 

If there is a part of Joseph Haydn’s remarkably vast oeuvre that has remained little known, it is opera. Nonetheless, he wrote nearly twenty operas while employed at the court of Count Esterházy. Haydn wrote the concert aria Scena di Berenice during his extraordinarily successful visit to England in 1795. The greatest artists of their day appeared at a benefit concert when Haydn premiered, among other things, the very last symphony he ever composed. The composer formally divided the text borrowed from the opera libretto Antigonos by Pietro Metastasio into two arias and two recitatives. Overall, Haydn’s musical setting of the dramatic scene impresses listeners as being very compact despite its broad range of affects from melancholy to hints of madness. More than ten minutes long, the cantata also makes demands of the highest order on the singer in terms of both technical brilliance and expression. At the same time, however, the performer’s emphasis must often be the same as with Mozart—Haydn’s music must also be sung cleanly, precisely, virtuosically, and yet very naturally.

The arrival of the new century found Ludwig van Beethoven, barely 30 years old, in a state of deep personal crisis. He had long suffered from tinnitus, his hearing was getting worse, and his thoughts turned towards death, which he feared, yet he also contemplated ending his own live. In 1802 he addressed to his two younger brothers a letter now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament. Although he never sent the letter, it served as a catharsis for his state of mind. Beethoven dismissed such gloomy thoughts and devoted himself to composing. During the period from 1802 to 1812, known as Beethoven’s “Heroic Period”, he composed many of his finest and most famous works, such as the Violin Concerto in D major, the Appassionata piano sonata, and the Triple Concerto for violin, cello, and piano as well as his Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, “Pastoral”.

The work was written in parallel with the Fifth Symphony with its fate motif. It might seem that the two works could not be more remote from each other in terms of mood, but the fact is that both are musical reflections of Beethoven’s emotional disposition. Just as the Fifth symbolises Beethoven the tortured Romantic, the Sixth is the composer’s confession of faith in nature, in which he found peace, refuge, and inspiration. With its unusual five-movement form, the symphony is one of the few compositions to which Beethoven himself lent a programmatic title, even giving non-musical names to the individual movements. Rather than attempting to be descriptive, however, he instead sought ways to express through music the feelings and moods evoked by an encounter with nature. There are exceptions like a passage in the slow second movement where Beethoven assigned the sounds of birds to specific instruments; a nightingale to the flutes, a quail to the oboes, and a cuckoo to a pair of bassoons. Even the yellowhammer is said to make an appearance. Beethoven did not write that bird’s name in the score, but he supposedly indicated its presence in the flutes to his friend and later biographer. The fourth movement is also highly descriptive. What begins as the muffled sound of light rain in the strings quickly turns into a dramatic storm roaring through the whole orchestra. A sudden and piercing bolt of lightning played on piccolo is followed by thunderous timpani and strong gusts of wind in sharply contoured string arpeggios. However, the tempestuous fourth movement subsides just as quickly as it arrived. The sun comes back out with the gentle tones of the flute, and a pastoral motif announces conciliation and the arrival of the symphony’s finale in a mood both celebration and humility. There is no reason not to believe that Beethoven supposedly loved trees more than people.