Czech Philharmonic • Leif Ove Andsnes

“I was rather a shy boy from a rural area of Norway,” recalls Leif Ove Andsnes, one of today’s most sought-after pianists, of his beginnings as a pianist. At the age of 15, Andsnes approached the leading Czech piano teacher Jiří Hlinka, with whom he later studied at the Bergen Music Conservatory. “I met this very passionate person for whom the music was life and death. He opened many doors for me, I always left the lesson with a great motivation to push myself further and I felt more and more confident in my playing,” says Andsnes, among other things, with regard to the rehearsal of Grieg’s Piano Concerto, which he first performed under Hlinka’s guidance.

This work by his compatriot is a staple of Andsnes’s repertoire and has accompanied him throughout his career. He first recorded it at the age of 20, in 1990, but after that he did not touch it for several years. He began performing it again at the beginning of the new millennium and recorded it anew, this time with greater detail, as critics have noted. The New York Times named Andsnes’s 2004 recording of Grieg’s Piano Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Mariss Jansons the “Best CD of the Year”, and it won the prestigious award of the Gramophone magazine.

Andsnes has already six Gramophone Awards and eleven Grammy nominations for more than 30 CDs released on EMI Classics. In October 2023, a complete set of all of Andsnes’s recordings made for EMI Classics over the course of 20 years was published by its successor, Warner Classics. Andsnes’s current label is Sony Classical, which focuses on his latest performances. These mainly consist of two major projects with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, spread over several seasons. The most recent is “Mozart Momentum 1785/86”, which features Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 20–24. It was preceded by “The Beethoven Journey”, a project showcasing the complete series of Beethoven piano concertos, which they presented together both live and in recording studios; these performances have been captured in a documentary of the same name.

One of Andsnes’s more than 230 Beethoven concerts took place at the Prague Spring Festival, where – as usual in these projects – Andsnes led the Mahler Chamber Orchestra from the piano. A few years later he appeared at this festival with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, and in 2022 he was invited to give a recital at the Rudolf Firkušný Festival. Andsnes has also appeared with the Czech Philharmonic.

Commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav, recipient of the prestigious Peer Gynt Prize, the Gilmore Artist Award and honorary doctorates from the University of Bergen and the Juilliard School of Music in New York, he lives in Bergen with his partner and three children (due to the premature birth of his twins he had to cancel his participation in the Prague Spring Festival in 2013). At the same time, he travels the world, taking up positions as artist-in-residence (e.g., with the Berlin Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic) and is also involved in concert programming. For one season, he curated Carnegie Hall’s “Perspectives” series; he is the founding director of the Rosendal Chamber Music Festival in Norway; and for nearly 20 years has helped direct the Ojai Music Festival in California. He balances his busy soloist career with chamber music, and gives an annual masterclass at the Jiří Hlinka Piano Academy in Bergen, named after the teacher who, along with the Belgian pianist Jacques de Tiege, once became Andsnes’s main and essential guide to the world of piano performance.

Thanks to her extraordinary versatility and sense of style, the mezzo-soprano Markéta Cukrová is a sought-after performer of vocal music from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Her long-standing success in early music performance has led to collaborations with renowned ensembles and orchestras (including La Risonanza, Collegium Marianum, Collegium Vocale Gent, Collegium 1704, Orkiestra Historyczna, the Czech Philharmonic, and the Flemish Philharmonic), with whom she has made more than 20 recordings. She has earned acclaim for her performances of the art song repertoire (Haydn, Mozart, Tomášek, Berlioz) with the accompaniment played on the fortepiano. Her album of arias by J. D. Zelenka with Ensemble Tourbillon and her recording of J. J. Ryba’s Stabat Mater with the orchestra L’Armonia Terrena, which received the 2017 Diapason d’Or, are highly acclaimed by the European musical community. In 2018, she issued a CD of Antonín Dvořák’s Moravian Duets accompanied by Vojtěch Spurný playing the original piano from the estate of Antonín Dvořák (Bösendorfer, Vienna 1879), and in 2022, her recording of songs by Bohuslav Martinů and Benjamin Britten accompanied by Ivo Kahánek was nominated for an Anděl Award. Besides performing art songs, she also devotes herself to the oratorio and symphonic repertoire.

In addition to her extensive concert activity, Cukrová also devotes herself to theatre. Her performance in the role of Dardano in Handel’s opera Amadigi di Gaula at the Händelfestspiele in Göttingen earned her enthusiastic praise from critics and the festival’s invitation to give a solo recital. Her large repertoire spans from Monteverdi to Kaija Saariaho, and she makes regular guest appearances at the National Theatres in Brno, Prague, and Ostrava. In 2022 with the Czech Philharmonic led by Semyon Bychkov, she sang the role of the Second Wood Sprite in Dvořák’s Rusalka, then a year later she accepted an invitation from Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden to make a guest appearance in Charpentier’s Médee under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle. In recent years, she has twice been nominated as a finalist for the Opera Plus Award for Best Opera Singer of the Season and for three more important awards (the Thalia Award, the Southern Bohemia Thalia, and the Classic Prague Awards).

Cukrová studied singing at the State Conservatoire in Bratislava and also took private singing lessons under Marie Urbanová. She graduated from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in English studies. She also teaches music and has authored a Czech translation of the book True Singing – a conversation with the successful singing teacher Margreet Honig about singing technique and teaching.

In 2022, Cukrová appeared in Vladimír Sommer’s Vocal Symphony at the Janáček Festival in Brno, enjoying wide critical acclaim. “Cukrová’s self-assured interpretation can be appreciated especially for the absolute clarity of expression, which she unwaveringly maintained throughout.” (Jiří Čevela, Harmonie)

“I was considered a bohemian at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University and an intellectual at the Theater Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts,” says Martin Myšička, who attended both schools at the same time, about his student years. Although he no longer deals with nuclear physics, he admits that studying it made a great difference, especially because of “the cultivation of rational thinking and analysis, which are useful for everyone.” Myšička is currently the artistic director of the Dejvice Theater, where he applies these skills to directing, which he has recently tried there. However, he is best known as an actor, a profession to which he has devoted himself for more than 20 years, during which he has appeared in more than 3,500 performances. At first he played in the Ypsilon Studio and the National Theater in Prague and was engaged as a guest in the Na zábradlí Theater and the West Bohemian Theater in Cheb. In 1997 he joined the Dejvice Theater, where he has starred in many productions, including The Brothers Karamazov, The Government Inspector, Oblomov, Tales of Ordinary Madness, Dubbing Street, The Elegance of the Molecule and The Murder of Gonzago. He has also worked in television and film, such as Whisper, Identity Card, Lost in Munich; the series Black Barons, The Fourth Star, Cosmo, The Destruction of the Dejvice Theater, Mills of the Gods, and The Settlement. He also likes to work for radio. He and his wife Bára have been subscribers of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra for many seasons, with whom he also occasionally collaborates professionally.

The Prague Philharmonic Choir (PPC), founded in 1935 by the choirmaster Jan Kühn, is the oldest professional mixed choir in the Czech Republic. Their current choirmaster and artistic director is Lukáš Vasilek, and the second choirmaster is Lukáš Kozubík.

The choir has earned the highest acclaim in the oratorio and cantata repertoire, performing with the world’s most famous orchestras. In this country, they collaborate regularly with the Czech Philharmonic and the Prague Philharmonia. They also perform opera as the choir-in-residence of the opera festival in Bregenz, Austria.

Programmes focusing mainly on difficult, lesser-known works of the choral repertoire. For voice students, they are organising the Academy of Choral Singing, and for young children there is a cycle of educational concerts.

The choir has been honoured with the 2018 Classic Prague Award and the 2022 Antonín Dvořák Prize.

The choirmaster of the Prague Philharmonic Choir and the chief conductor of the opera chorus of the National Theatre in Prague, Lukáš Kozubík has made guest appearances at many Czech and Slovak opera houses and in collaboration with leading orchestras. Thanks to his warm, human approach, besides classical concerts, he also focuses on education projects and a new series of family concerts.

He graduated from the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno, studying choral conducting under Lubomír Mátl; he also graduated from the opera singing programmes at the Janáček Conservatoire and the Institute for Artistic Studies at the University of Ostrava. While a student, he began working with several concert choirs; his highly varied artistic activities have taken him to the positions of assistant conductor, choirmaster, and vocal coach of the Chamber Opera at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts. Highly experienced, he has to his credit dozens of operatic productions, which he rehearsed not only in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, especially during his tenure training the opera chorus at the State Theatre in Košice, Slovakia, but also at festivals in Hungary, Poland, and Germany. His repertoire also includes cantatas and oratorios.

Born in the Czech Republic, Jakub Hrůša is Chief Conductor of the Bamberg Symphony, Music Director Designate of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden (Music Director from 2025), and Principal Guest Conductor of the Czech Philharmonic. He was also formerly Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra.

He is a frequent guest with the world’s greatest orchestras, including the Vienna, Berlin, Munich and New York Philharmonics; Bavarian Radio, NHK, Chicago and Boston Symphonies; Leipzig Gewandhaus, Lucerne Festival, Royal Concertgebouw, Mahler Chamber and The Cleveland Orchestras; Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and Tonhalle Orchester Zürich. He has led opera productions for the Salzburg Festival (Káťa Kabanová with the Vienna Philharmonic in 2022), Vienna State Opera, Royal Opera House, and Opéra National de Paris. He has also been a regular guest with Glyndebourne Festival and served as Music Director of Glyndebourne On Tour for three years.

His relationships with leading vocal and instrumental soloists have included collaborations in recent seasons with Daniil Trifonov, Mitsuko Uchida, Hélène Grimaud, Behzod Abduraimov, Anne Sofie Mutter, Lisa Batiashvili, Joshua Bell, Yefim Bronfman, Rudolf Buchbinder, Gautier Capuçon, Julia Fischer, Sol Gabetta, Hilary Hahn, Janine Jansen, Karita Mattila, Leonidas Kavakos, Lang Lang, Josef Špaček, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Yuja Wang, Frank Peter Zimmermann, Alisa Weilerstein and others. 

As a recording artist, Jakub Hrůša has received numerous awards and nominations for his discography. Most recently, he received the Opus Klassik Conductor of the Year 2023 prize and the ICMA prize for Symphonic Music for his recording of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, and the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik for his recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, both with Bamberg Symphony. In 2021, his disc of Martinů and Bartók violin concertos with Bamberg Symphony and Frank Peter Zimmermann was nominated for BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone awards, and his recording of the Dvořák Violin Concerto with the Bavarian Radio Symphony and Augustin Hadelich was nominated for a Grammy Award. 
 
Jakub Hrůša studied at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where his teachers included Jiří Bělohlávek. He is President of the International Martinů Circle and The Dvořák Society. He was the inaugural recipient of the Sir Charles Mackerras Prize, and in 2020 was awarded both the Antonín Dvořák Prize by the Czech Republic’s Academy of Classical Music, and – together with Bamberg Symphony – the Bavarian State Prize for Music. 

Pavel Zemek Novák has developed a distinctive compositional style based on the simplest consonance, such as unison, and working with its various variations in the vertical (harmonic) and horizontal (melodic) components of consonance. He now focuses on perfecting a large scale unison form of the Passion. After the St. Luke Passion for large ensemble (2010-2017) and the St. John Passion for chamber ensemble (2022-2023), he is completing the St. Matthew Passion, which he has been working on since 2017, and the Harp Concerto for Ensemble Opera Diversa.

Canto, to be premiered tonight, came into being between 2018 and 2021. The composer says: “In the composition, I resigned both to the established unison whole with individual movements, and to the instrumentation of the unison with the sound of stringed instruments (piano, harp, etc.) and melodic percussion instruments (bells, chimes, etc.); it was therefore necessary to emphasize the passage of time. The horizontal of the form consists only of a miniature four-note motif, taken at random from the choir of the “invisible” L-wing of the Chapel of the Poor Clares of Brno, which is heard in the cello solo after the introduction. The content and form are expanded by St. Veronica Giuliani’s idea of the harmony of the three hearts (a polymetric piece with three triangles), and by the final quotation of a chant from the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In Canto, the vocal and instrumental lines continuously merge with the basis in Gregorian chant.”

“Aware of my imperfection, I dedicate my Canto to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary as an expression of gratitude for their lifelong enduring support. I would like to express my special thanks to the artistic council of the Czech Philharmonic, upon whose initiative I was commissioned this work in 2018.”

The Norwegian composer Edvard Hagerup Grieg studied composition and piano at the Leipzig Conservatory from 1858 to 1862, therefore works for piano form an important part of his compositional legacy. His only piano concerto, Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16, has become a repertory staple of Romantic music. It was composed in 1868 during Grieg’s summer stay in Denmark. The choice of the A minor key is surely no coincidence, but a reference to the only piano concerto by Robert Schumann, of whom Grieg was a great admirer. The fact that these two composers speak a common musical language is often pointed out. The premiere of the concerto was given on 3 April 1869 in Copenhagen by the Royal Danish Orchestra (Det Kongelige Kapel) under the direction of its chief conductor Holger Simon Paulli (1810–1891); the solo part was played by the Norwegian pianist Edmund Neupert, who had just moved to Copenhagen at that time and whose art was compared to that of Franz Liszt. Grieg was not able to attend the premiere due to another commitment in Norway, but among those present was the pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein, who himself composed five piano concertos that are among the highlights of Romantic piano literature. Grieg’s concerto opens with a timpani roll with descending sequences in octaves on piano, followed by the orchestra with its own theme. This movement is essentially in sonata form reminiscent of rhapsody, with the obligatory virtuosic cadenza at the end. The dreamy song in the slow movement evokes the bleak beauty of Nordic nature, while the final movement employs the rhythms of Norwegian folk dances.

Grieg’s Piano Concerto was first performed in Prague on 25 March 1903 at the Rudolfinum as part of the composer’s visit to Bohemia. The concert was one of the few examples of Czechs and Germans joining forces at a time of heightened nationalist emotions. It was organized by the Czech music publishing house and the concert management company of F. A. Urbánek, who invited Grieg to Prague. The performance was given by the orchestra of the New German Theater; the soloist at the piano was Teresita Carreño-Tagliapetra, daughter of the famous Spanish pianist Teresa Carreño. The program also featured Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, performed by Antonín Dvořák’s daughter Magda Dvořáková, and Grieg’s songs. “Edvard Grieg, who tirelessly conducted the three-hour concert and gave a German-language thank-you at the end, was understandably the object of a special ovation that continued into the street as the master left the concert building in an open carriage,” wrote the newspaper the next day. Grieg also visited the director of the New German Theatre, Angel Neumann, to praise the orchestra’s performance.

Vladimír Sommer is one of the major Czech composers of the 20th century. His extensive oeuvre belongs to the gold fund of works created by his generation, and his Vocal Symphony for alto, narrator, choir and orchestra on texts by Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Cesare Pavese occupies a crucial place among them. It dates back to the period of slow political liberalization in the Eastern Bloc, which was manifested, for example, by the founding of Warsaw Autumn, a Polish festival of contemporary music, in 1956, which presented works that broke away from the doctrine of Socialist Realism; another impulse came from the International Summer Courses for New Music (Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik) in Darmstadt-Kranichstein, which began in 1955. Sommer composed his Vocal Symphony in 1958, but it had to wait several years for its performance because it was based on texts considered provocative at the time. An international conference held in 1963 in Liblice near Mělník contributed to the rediscovery of the work of Franz Kafka (1883–1924); until then, Kafka’s texts had been disseminated more or less in secret. An excerpt chosen by Sommer from the novel Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) also had an existential dimension. The work of Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) is a reflection of his frustrations and disillusionment with political developments, which he experienced first as an anti-fascist and, after the war, as a communist. Disappointments in his public and private life drove this author to suicide.

The first two movements are in the form of passacaglia, which especially in the second movement made it possible for Sommer to build up the effect to the maximum; the third movement consists of freeform variations. At the time of its creation, the Vocal Symphony was perceived by the authorities primarily as an expression of pessimism in life. Although a work for voice and orchestra was desirable, the Vocal Symphony did not meet the criteria of a cheerful composition. The premiere took place as late as 12 March 1963 with the Prague Symphony Orchestra and the Czech Choir under the baton of Václav Neumann who made it happen; the alto solo was sung by Věra Soukupová and the narrator was Otakar Brousek. The reviews at that time claimed that “the work does not leave a feeling of hopelessness and resignation, but of purifying catharsis,” “behind the musically strongly modeled images we feel the composer’s urgent message for humanity,” and Sommer’s symphony was compared to the symphonies of Gustav Mahler and Dmitri Shostakovich.

The following Czech performances of the Vocal Symphony were presented by the conductors Karel Ančerl, Jiří Bělohlávek and Petr Altrichter, the singers Nina Hazuchová, Dagmar Pecková and Jindřiška Rainerová, and the narrators Jan Tříska, Radovan Lukavský and Petr Haničinec; it was performed three times at the Prague Spring Festival (1964, 1968, 2000) and many times also by international orchestras.