Czech Chamber Music Society • Pražák Quartet & Jiří Vodička

The Pražák Quartet was established in 1972 as an ensemble at the Prague Conservatoire under the guidance of Viktor Moučka. During their further studies at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague in the studio of Antonín Kohout, they won first prize in a national string quartet competition, quickly followed by two first prizes at international competitions: in Evian in 1978 and at the 1979 Prague Spring Competition. Since then, they have been one of the world’s top quartets, following in the unique Czech quartet tradition.

They are seen regularly on concert stages in the great cities of Europe like Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Milan, London, and Berlin as well as in North America, for example. They are often invited to prestigious festivals, where they have appeared with such artists as Menahem Pressler, Jon Nakamatsu, Cynthia Phelps, Roberto Diaz, Josef Suk, and Sharon Kam. At present, the quartet collaborates mainly with the pianist François Dumont, with whom they have made recordings and appeared at the Théâtre du Champs-Elysées and at the Salle Gaveau in Paris, and they have been guests at international festivals including the Cartagena Music Festival in Columbia.

The Pražák Quartet records on the Praga Digitals label, with 60 CDs issued so far; 50 of those highly acclaimed recordings were released in a special box set to honour the quartet’s 50th anniversary. Besides numerous radio recordings in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic, the quartet has also realised recordings for Supraphon, Panton, Orfeo, Ottavo, Bonton, and Nuova Era. Their latest recordings released on the Praga Digitals label include a CD with the last three quartets by Joseph Haydn, which earned critical acclaim, including positive reviews in the journals The Strad and Diapason, an album for the 200th anniversary of César Franck’s birth recorded in collaboration with the pianist François Dumont, and Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ with the soprano Helen Kearns (August 2024).

The quartet’s personnel has changed several times over their many years of performing. In 2015, they invited Jana Vonášková, a graduate of London’s Royal College of Music, to take over as their first violinist, and she quickly earned great respect from both the public and critics. She has managed to incorporate into her repertoire all of the major works in the quartet literature including the complete string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven. The quartet’s biggest change of generations came in the 2020/2021 season, when the second violinist Vlastimil Holek was replaced by Marie Fuxová and the cellist Michal Kaňka by Jonáš Krejčí. Josef Klusoň, the ensemble’s guiding spirit and the only member remaining from the time of the quartet’s founding, has remained as the violist with the new players.

The exceptional quality of the quartet’s new personnel is more than promising for a future of excellence. The new members are taking an approach of maximum responsibility to the quartet’s renewal, striving above all to preserve the character and programming philosophy of that superior ensemble, which made Czech quartet playing famous all around the world.

The international career of the French pianist François Dumont was launched by successes at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, the Clara Haskil Competition, and the Monte Carlo Piano Masters Competition. Since then, he has been making solo appearances all around the world with such ensembles as the Orchestre National de France, the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre, the Warsaw National Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, and he has been invited to international festivals such as the Festival International de la Roque dʼAnthéron and Piano aux Jacobins in Toulouse. He has also appeared on stage at Vienna’s Musikverein, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, and the Kennedy Center in Washington. He performs regularly in China, Japan, and South Korea.

His recording of Ravel’s two piano concertos with the Orchestre National de Lyon led by Leonard Slatkin for the Naxos label met with great critical acclaim. Dumont has long been devoting himself to Ravel, having recorded his complete works for piano. His discography also includes Mozart’s complete piano sonatas, the complete piano trios of Beethoven and Schubert, three albums of Chopin and two of Bach, and a special recording of Fauré’s Nocturnes on a period piano. With the Orchestre National de Bretagne, he is recording the piano concertos of W. A. Mozart, conducting from the keyboard.

There is no lack of chamber music appearances on Dumont’s busy calendar. Besides playing with the Pražák Quartet, he also appears frequently with the Voce Quartet, for example, and with such musicians as Sayaka Shoji, Marc Coppey, Augustin Dumay, and Laurent Korcia. With his wife, the soprano Helen Kearns, he is discovering the Lieder repertoire, and he also has close ties to contemporary music, working actively with the composers Nicolas Bacri, Pascal Dusapin, Sophie Lacaze, and Tristan Murail.

A native of Lyon, he first studied in the city of his birth under the pianists Pascale Imbert and Chrystel Saussac, then under Hervé Billaut and later at the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique under Bruno Rigutto. Thereafter, he continued his training at the International Piano Academy at Lake Como and at the Lieven Piano Foundation. He is now passing his knowledge on to piano students at the Haute École de Musique de Genève and at masterclasses in Europe and Japan.

One of the most important and sought-after Czech violinists and the concertmaster of the Czech Philharmonic Jiří Vodička has excelled in a number of competitions since very early on (Kocian International Violin Competition, Prague Junior Note, the best participant at violin classes led by Václav Hudeček, among others). At the unusually early age of 14, he was admitted to the Institute for Artistic Studies at the University of Ostrava, where he studied under the renowned pedagogue Zdeněk Gola. He graduated in 2007 with a master’s degree. His success continued as an adult, for example winning first and second prizes at the world-famous competition Young Concert Artists (2008) held in Leipzig and New York.

He has made solo appearances not only with Czech orchestras like the Prague Philharmonia or the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, but also with the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra, the New Philharmonic Orchestra of Westphalia, and the Wuhan Philharmonic Orchestra. His professional activities are of greater breadth, however. In 2014, he recorded his debut solo album “Violino Solo” on the Supraphon label, and crossover fans can hear him on his worldwide Vivaldianno tour. He has performed chamber music with the outstanding Czech pianists Martin Kasík, Ivo Kahánek, Ivan Klánský, David Mareček, and Miroslav Sekera. He regularly takes part at famous festivals, such as the Prague Spring, Janacek’s May, Grand festival of China and Choriner Musiksommer. He was a member of the Smetana Trio from 2012 to 2018; in 2020 he founded the Piano Trio of the Czech Philharmonic, with which he won the Vienna International Competition in 2021. Many of the concerts of the “Czech Paganini”, as Vodička is sometimes called because of his extraordinary technical skill, have been recorded by Czech Television, Czech Radio, or the German broadcasting company ARD. Besides all of that he teaches at the University of Ostrava. 

He plays Italian violin made by Joseph Gagliano in 1767 which he received for long-term use from the Czech Philharmonic’s former chief conductor Jiří Bělohlávek.

French composer Darius Milhaud was born in Marseille and grew up in Aix-en-Provence. In his memoirs from 1949 he introduced himself as “Je suis un Français de Provence et de religion israélite.” (“I am a Frenchman from Provence, and by religion a Jew.”) His father was a businessman, but also a skilled pianist who played a significant role in local cultural life; his mother, from a family of Sephardic Jews in Italy, was a wonderful singer. Little Darius began to study the violin and at 12 he was playing in an amateur string quartet. He admitted that the music by Claude Debussy was a complete revelation for him, which led to his decision to pursue music professionally. In 1909, Milhaud entered the Paris Conservatory, became enthusiastic about the Symbolists Maurice Maeterlinck, André Gide, and the Impressionists, and absorbed a wide variety of musical stimuli which he encountered in the performances of Stravinsky’s ballets Petrushka and the scandalous premiere of his Rite of Spring, as well as in the discovery of Arnold Schoenberg’s first atonal works. In 1912 he met Paul Claudel, with whom he sought to create a new concept of musical drama. (Claudel had a career in the diplomatic service for 30 years. Milhaud later became his secretary in Brazil and subsequently integrated elements of Brazilian folk tunes into his music.)

In 1918, a group of composers, who later became known as “Les Six”, appeared in a small theater in Paris. Its members – Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and the only woman among them, Germaine Taillefere – did not establish any common aesthetic program. They were connected by their ostentatious rejection of Neo-Romanticism and their fascination with the music of nightclubs and cabarets, variety shows, the circus and the new dance music imported from America. Soon each went his own way, but “Les Six” of Paris brought new impulses to the whole of Europe. Milhaud presented himself in person in Czechoslovakia on 2 April 1933 as pianist at a concert of the Czech Chamber Music Society, where he performed his Suite Concertante for Piano and String Quartet and several piano pieces with the Prague Quartet, and on 5 April with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra as conductor of his own works. He came to Prague for the second time in 1966 as a guest of the Prague Spring Festival to give the world premiere of his Musique pour Prague.

Milhaud’s compositional legacy comprises over 400 opuses of all genres as well as many works without opus numbers. His music scored for chamber ensembles includes 18 string quartets composed between 1912 and 1950. These quartets document Milhaud’s stylistic evolution over the course of time from the first quartet arising from Romanticism to the more elaborate structures of the later quartets. String Quartet No. 1, Op. 5, dedicated to Paul Cézanne, is in the traditional form of four movements. The main feature of the lively outer movements is the rhythmic component, while the inner slow movements are dominated by melody. The influence of Claude Debussy is evident in the timbre of the sound. In 1950 Milhaud revised the work and eliminated the third movement.

Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor, the only string quartet he has written, came into being in the years 1892–1893 during the period in which he composed his symphonic poem Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) after Stéphane Mallarmé. While with the symphonic poem he has opened a new, modern phase in music, with the string quartet he appeals to the Classical-Romantic heritage both in the four-movement form of the quartet and in the structure of its individual movements. The first movement is in sonata form in which the main motif appears in variations. The following movement is a scherzo with a trio. The third slow movement is sometimes described as a melancholic nocturne, and for the final movement the composer has chosen the sonata rondo form. Nevertheless, the composition brings innovation. The core of the main motif, for example, appears in variation in the second movement as well, and the tonal material is enriched with ecclesiastical modes, influences of the music of the Orient and other inspirations.

The quartet was premiered by the Ysaÿe Quartet on 29 December 1893 in Paris, but it was not received very enthusiastically. The second performance of this work was given by the Ysaÿe Quartet on 4 March 1894 in Brussels at a concert featuring Debussy’s latest works. “All these creations were of such kind that even our self-proclaimed progressives found them too daring,” a reviewer remarked. Audiences had not yet fully understood Debussy’s musical language, but he was appreciated by his fellow musicians such as, in addition to Eugène Ysaÿe, Vincent d’Indy, Ernest Chausson and Paul Dukas, who wrote about him at the time: “Debussy is one of the most original members of the younger generation who do not see music as a means of expressing emotion, but for whom the goal is emotion itself.”

The Société nationale de musique was established in 1871 in Paris by the composer Camille Saint-Saëns and the professor of singing Romain Bussine, among others. Its founding was a result of nationalist sentiments after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Although initially the aims of this society were met with distrust and the connection between music and politics was rejected, it greatly contributed to the emergence of a young artistic generation as well as the promotion of genres hitherto neglected by French composers, including chamber music. In 1886, Ernest Chausson became secretary of the society. He had originally studied law, but his acquaintance with César Franck and his impressions of a visit to Wagner’s Bayreuth made him take the path of music.

Concerto for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet, Op. 21 is interesting because of its unconventional combination of instruments. The violin part was written for the above-mentioned Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. The accompaniment of a concertante piece by a chamber ensemble instead of an orchestra had its model in the music of earlier periods, but at the same time Chausson was pointing towards a new era when composers often resorted to smaller ensembles for practical reasons because it gave them the hope of a performance without having to negotiate with orchestras and, above all, of a performance less costly.

The concerto was premiered on 4 March 1892 in Brussels by the Quatuor Crickboom with Ysaÿe taking the solo violin part and Auguste Pierret at the piano. A few months later the work was performed at a concert of the Société nationale de musique in Paris. The first movement is dominated by a theme whose development is sometimes compared to the “idée fixe” of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. The dance movement Sicilienne refers to music of earlier periods, while the following Grave is characterized by a chromatic melodic line. The final lively movement employs reminiscences of the material from the preceding movements.