Czech Philharmonic • Katia and Marielle Labèque

From the Basque region of France, then almost untouched by classical music, to the greatest concert halls in the world – this is the story of the Labèque sisters with a career spanning more than 50 years, who have been described as “the best piano duo in front of an audience today” (New York Times). But the shared story of the sisters, who have had a lifelong and intense relationship both professionally and personally, is much longer. The elder Katia first began playing piano under the tutelage of her mother, a pianist and piano teacher, and two years younger Marielle soon followed suit. In 1968, they entered the Paris Conservatory, but still as two soloists – the idea of forming a piano duo did not arise until after they had graduated from the conservatory, and so they then enrolled in a chamber music class there. They still remember how, while rehearsing Visions de l’Amen, they were suddenly interrupted by Olivier Messiaen, who happened to be passing by their class and wondered who was playing his piece. He was so impressed that he helped them record the work, which was not only their first recording experience but also an important invitation to the world of contemporary composers – after Messiaen, they worked with György Ligeti, Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio. Their career breakthrough came with their original arrangement of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which became one of the first gold records of classical music.

The Labèque sisters have performed in famous concert halls from the Musikverein in Vienna to Carnegie Hall in New York, have been guests at major festivals (BBC Proms, Salzburg, Tanglewood) and have appeared with the most celebrated orchestras in the world (Berlin Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, La Scala Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, etc.). “We don’t have the huge repertoire of a solo pianist or a violinist, but we have all the more freedom to create our own music and our own projects,” say the sisters, who collaborate with Baroque music ensembles (such as The English Baroque Soloists with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Il Giardino Armonico with Giovanni Antonini), but they also venture into the field of “non-artificial” (natural) music (Katia even played in a rock band).

The problem of the limited repertoire for piano duo is also solved by addressing contemporary composers. In addition to the above mentioned, in 2015 they gave the world premiere of Philip Glass’s Double Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel. Two years later they premiered Bryce Dessner’s Concerto for Two Pianos expressly written for them, and recorded it for the album “El Chan”. The Labèques also performed this piece in Prague’s Rudolfinum – although due to the pandemic (2021) without an audience, only in a streamed version. However, this was not the Labèque sisters’ first meeting with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra (whose chief conductor Semyon Bychkov is Marielle Labèque’s husband). In April 2017, the Dvořák Hall witnessed their performance of Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, and a year later they made their solo debut there.

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).

During its more than 1,000 years of history, Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice fostered quite a number of composers who became famous in Italy and beyond. Among the church’s organists or maestri (music directors) were such truly illustrious figures of their day as Gioseffo Zarlino, Francesco Cavalli, Baldassare Galuppi, and Claudio Monteverdi. This was also the formative environment for Giovanni Gabrieli, who succeeded his uncle Andrea in 1585 as the church’s first organist.

Gabrieli witnessed the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque, and he was himself an important influence on the newly emerging musical style. Early in his career as a composer, he experimented with a variety of musical forms, but he decided rather quickly to concentrate on those genres that were closely tied to the milieu of the church where he was active. Besides the tradition of his great predecessors and of their manuscripts, which he was able to study and even have issued in print, Gabrielli’s music also audibly reflects the space inside Saint Mark’s Basilica itself. The highly segmented interior of that extraordinarily imposing cathedral afforded unusual acoustical possibilities to the composers working there. It is no wonder the church became the site of the development of the Venetian polychoral style that dominated sacred music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque, especially in northern Italy. The dispersion of choirs of vocalists or instrumentalists at various places around the cathedral and playful exploration of the effects of those groups’ dynamics, harmonies, and timbres made these compositions especially sonically rich, colourful, and shapely.

Canzonas were originally modelled after vocal forms, but Gabrieli developed them into longer, more complex polyphonic structures. While working at Saint Mark’s, he wrote several dozen of these rather brief compositions both for singers and for instrumental ensembles of various sizes, and especially for brass instruments. The arrival of the Baroque is clearly audible in these pieces. Composing based upon the principle of contrast became one of the building blocks providing a foundation for the emergence of concertante forms such as the sonata or the concerto grosso.

Already by age 19, the Bologna native Adriano Banchieri had taken the path of a clergyman, becoming a monk in the Order of Saint Benedict, but his career as a composer took a turn in a rather different direction. A contemporary of the more famous composer Claudio Monteverdi, he wrote a number of sacred works, but he also left his mark on music history as a composer of madrigals—polyphonic vocal compositions usually for four to six voices. In addition, Banchieri compiled madrigals into topical cycles that combined to carry a continuous narrative. These cycles, known as madrigal comedies, were especially intended for private performances and aristocratic courts, so their subject matter was often satirical or parodistic, taking inspiration from everyday life and people’s interactions. There was still a long way to go before the emergence of opera, but madrigal comedies certainly contributed to the creation of opera and influenced the initial form the genre assumed.

As an organist and music theorist, however, Banchieri also composed instrumental music. His Concerto primo “La Battaglia” is not a concerto in the form intimately familiar to us from the High Baroque, for example, but rather a canzona in the manner of Gabrieli. La Battaglia is a musical stylisation of a battle scene. Playful, rhythmically precise, and highly virtuosic, it was probably originally composed for vocal ensemble or a keyboard instrument, but when arranged for brass, its character and extramusical inspiration stand out all the more.

Few people had as strong an influence on the young Mozart as his older sister Marie Anna. Known at home as Nannerl, she was Wolfgang’s childhood playmate and a confidante to whom he addressed letters from his travels. Besides extraordinary musical talent, the brother and sister also shared the enjoyment of piquant wordplay. Wolfgang held his sister in deep admiration from an early age, learning from Nannerl and sharing his musical ideas with her. Nannerl was a talented pianist, and she made appearances together with her brother both at home in Salzburg and on tours around Europe, but she was forced to cease appearing in public when she reached adulthood; a career as a professional musician was entirely unthinkable for a young woman in those days.

Piano concertos are a common thread running throughout Mozart’s lifetime. In all, he wrote 27 of them, the first when he was 11 years old, and the last just a few weeks before his death. All his life, he worked to achieve perfect mastery of the form, and there is no doubt that his concertos represent one of the highpoints of the genre’s development. Especially in his late works, perfect formal mastery is wed to his practically inexhaustible melodic inventiveness. Moreover, Mozart premiered most of his concertos himself, so he did not hold back in them in terms of either expression or virtuosity.

The Concerto No. 10 in E flat major for two pianos fits perfectly within Mozart’s series of piano concertos. In 1779 while still employed at the court of the archbishop in Salzburg, he wrote the concerto in order to play it himself with Nannerl. The opening movement bristles with joyous energy, and the two soloists compliment each other in a dialogue that is cheerful and light in some places, majestic in others, with richly colourful interjections from the orchestra. The slow and lyrical second movement features a songful melody, and the tender chords of the two pianos are accompanied by the strings and woodwinds. The concluding rondo overflows with virtuosic motifs and themes played successively by the two soloists and the orchestra. The music comes across as a tongue-in-cheek representation of playful sibling rivalry.

Just like Mozart, Franz Schubert was not afforded enough time on this earth to take full advantage of the enormous talent he had been given. Nonetheless, during his brief lifetime, Schubert managed to compose a remarkable amount of music and to earn the standing of one of the most important figures of music history. The catalogue of Schubert’s compositions contains nearly 1,500 items, and there is almost no genre to which he did not devote himself at least marginally. Only 14 years separate his first symphony from his last. He underwent a remarkable development as a symphonist. While his early works combine the legacy of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Antonio Salieri with a deep admiration of Beethoven, his later music clearly foreshadows the great works of Romanticism by Mendelssohn, Schumann, or Brahms.

The numbering of Schubert’s symphonies has been chaotic practically from the time when they were written. In various catalogues, we find the Symphony in C major, known as “The Great”, numbered as the eighth, the ninth, and sometimes even the seventh. In any case, the score bears 1828 as the date of completion, so it is his last symphony chronologically. It is likely, however, that Schubert had already done much of the work on the symphony in the summer of 1825. Together with Michael Vogel, a baritone who interpreted his songs, Schubert went on a long tour around Austria giving recitals that were artistically and financially successful for the composer. A year later, he made the final revisions to his Symphony in C major, but lacking the money to pay for a performance, he sent the score to the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna, which operated a conservatoire and thus had a student orchestra. The society paid Schubert for the score and had the individual orchestral parts written out. However, it soon became evident that the composition was too difficult for the student orchestra, so its official premiere did not take place during Schubert’s lifetime. It was not first played until 1839 in Leipzig under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn, and today it is regarded as core symphonic repertoire of early Romanticism.

Franz Schubert certainly did not suffer from any lack of melodic ideas, but he was also capable of elaborating them. Nearly the entire first movement of the Great Symphony in C Major is based on the opening melodic motif, but at the same time it follows the basic rules of sonata form, developing a principal and a secondary theme. The second movement is slow and lyrical. While in some of Schubert’s earlier symphonies, the sound of the orchestra in slow movements tends to be gently pastoral, the character here is one of poised majesty. The rhythmic scherzo contains moments of tender radiance as well as dramatic outbursts of the full orchestra at loud dynamics. The thematic material of the finale is based on the previous movements. In this monumental music at a quick tempo with exciting rhythms, Schubert also pays tribute to Beethoven by quoting a motif from his Ninth Symphony. In the fourth movement, as in the Great Symphony in C Major as a whole, Schubert crosses over into territory of the great symphonies of Romanticism, and we are left wondering what direction the composer might have taken had his life not ended so early.