Czech Chamber Music Society • Václav Petr

One of the finest Czech cellists, Václav Petr has served as concert master of the Czech Philharmonic cello section for over a decade. He has performed as a soloist since the age of 12. As a member of The Trio, he has also devoted to chamber music.  

Václav Petr learned the rudiments of viola playing at the Jan Neruda School in Prague from Mirko Škampa and subsequently continued to study the instrument at the Academy of Performing Arts in the class of Daniel Veis, graduating under the guidance of Michal Kaňka. He further honed his skills at the Universität der Künste in Berlin under the tutelage of Wolfgang Boettcher, and also at international masterclasses (in Kronberg, Hamburg, Vaduz, Bonn and Baden-Baden). He has garnered a number of accolades, initially as a child (Prague Junior Note, International Cello Competition in Liezen, Talents of Europe) and then in Europe’s most prestigious contests (semi-final at the Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann, victory at the Prague Spring Competition).

At the age of 24, after winning the audition, he became one of the youngest concert masters in the Czech Philharmonic’s history. As a soloist, he has performed with the Czech Philharmonic, the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Prague Philharmonia, the Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava and the Philharmonie Baden-Baden.

Václav Petr has made a name for himself as a chamber player too. Between 2009 and 2020, he was a member of the Josef Suk Piano Quartet, with whom he received first prizes at the competitions in Val Tidone and Verona (Salieri-Zinetti), as well as at the highly prestigious Premio Trio di Trieste. In 2019, he, the violinist and concert master Jiří Vodička, and the pianist Martin Kasík formed the Czech Philharmonic Piano Trio, later renamed The Trio. During the Covid pandemic, they made a recording of Bohuslav Martinů’s Bergerettes (clad in period costumes), which would earn them victory at an international competition in Vienna.

In December 2023, Václav Petr and the young Czech pianist Marek Kozák gained acclaim at the Bohuslav Martinů Days: “The interpretation of all the compositions reveals the signature of seasoned chamber musicians. The audience savoured the duo’s splendid work with tempo, agogics, dynamics and colour,” wrote Jiří Bezděk for the OperaPlus server. And who knows? Perhaps – just as at the festival – the two musicians will delight us with a piano-four-hands encore. 

The young Czech pianist Marek Kozák has been lauded for his impeccable technique, sense of proportion and gradation, plethora of registers, immense musicality and profound respect for the score. A highly cultivated performer, he enchants listeners with his ability to “convey with humility and without ostentatious gesture that which the composer aimed to express” (M. Bátor, Czech Radio, Vltava).

A graduate of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he studied under Ivan Klánský, he has received many international awards. In June 2021, he became a laureate of the prestigious Concours Géza Anda in Zürich. Moreover, he advanced to the final of the Ferruccio Busoni Competition in Bolzano and the semi-final of the Fryderyk Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and won the European Piano Competition in Bremen, where he also earned the audience prize. He received second prize at the 2016 Prague Spring Competition for his performance of Adam Skoumal’s The Juggler. 
A pianist enjoying international renown, Marek Kozák has been invited to give recitals in Switzerland, Germany, Spain and other countries. Yet he has most frequently performed in the Czech Republic, appearing at such major events as the Leoš Janáček International Music Festival in Ostrava, Smetana’s Litomyšl, Dvořák Prague, Saint Wenceslas Music Festival and the Rudolf Firkušný International Piano Festival. He has performed with leading Czech orchestras as a soloist and within their recital cycles (in February 2023, he debuted as a guest of the Prague Symphony Orchestra at the Rudolfinum). 

Besides the piano repertoire staples, primarily Fryderyk Chopin and J. S. Bach works (he performed both sets of The Well-Tempered Clavier at two successive editions of Smetana’s Litomyšl, for instance), he has also undertaken little-known piano concertos by Karel Kovařovic, Vítězslava Kaprálová and Pavel Bořkovec, which he has recorded with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Jindra. His most recent album, Zapomenuté klavírní koncerty (Forgotten Piano Concertos), released in March 2024, has extended his discography, following his profile CD featuring pieces by Joseph Haydn, Fryderyk Chopin, César Franck, Sergei Rachmaninov and Adam Skoumal.

In addition to appearing as a soloist, Marek Kozák performs chamber music, most often along with the soprano Simona Šaturová and – as today – the cellist Václav Petr. Within the current Year of Czech Music, he and the German tenor Thoma Jaron-Wutz have prepared a recital focusing on Bedřich Smetana’s life. Mark Kozák also works as an educator, teaching at the City of Prague Music School. 

Ludwig van Beethoven modeled the structure of his two Sonatas for Cello and Piano, Op. 102 after Mozart, but filled it with music that – like most works of his late period – caused embarrassment among his contemporaries. The impulse for both sonatas came from Beethoven’s acquaintance with the cellist Joseph Linke, who as a member of the Schuppanzigh Quartet later also participated in the premieres of Beethoven’s late string quartets. The sonatas were composed in 1815 and Linke first performed them together with Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny. In the Sonata in D major, which is Beethoven’s last ever cello sonata, the composer employed the contrapuntal technique that he had increasingly explored in his last creative phase. The sonata opens with a sixteenth-note figure in the piano, a kind of motto that in combination with the other material goes through the whole movement. A strong contrast is brought about by the slow movement, which in its expression comes close to the epoch of Romanticism in music. The cello and the piano instruments are in dialogue with each other; the movement alternates between major and minor keys; the main and surprising climax of the movement comes its coda. The final movement serves as an example of Beethoven’s humor. The composer deliberately begins in a rather banal way only to come up with a fugal theme and inventive rhythmic transformations of an almost improvisatory nature.

Large-scale works of major forms are considered evidence of compositional mastery. Nevertheless, there are small pieces which are no less perfect. Both Antonín Dvořák and Josef Suk were able to compose on a large scale, while creating a unique miniature. Antonín Dvořák’s composition for cello and piano, Silent Woods, Op. 68 is an arrangement of one of the movements of his cycle for four-hand piano, From the Bohemian Forest, of 1884. This arrangement was written for a concert tour that Dvořák undertook in Bohemia and Moravia before his departure for the United States. The work was first performed on 28 December 1891 in Rakovník by the cellist Hanuš Wihan with the composer at the piano. The next arrangement of the same composition was an instrumentation of the piano accompaniment for small orchestra, created two years later. Rondo, Op. 94, composed for Hanuš Wihan for the same purpose of a farewell tour before going overseas, was first performed by Wihan and Dvořák on 8 January 1892 in Chrudim.

In 1900, two of Josef Suk’s compositions for cello and piano, Ballade and Serenade, were published in Berlin under one opus number. The Ballade, Op. 3, No. 1 was an incidental piece composed for a concert by Karel Stecker’s pupils at the Prague Conservatory and was premiered by Otto Berger, to whom it is dedicated, and Josef Suk on 15 January 1891. Five years later Suk revised the piece. The Serenade, Op. 3, No. 2 was first presented on 28 April 1898 at the Konvikt hall in Prague by the cellist Rudolf Pavlata and the composer himself. After two more performances with different performers, on 27 November of the same year the two works were performed together in the Rudolfinum at the “Concert of the Young Music Generation” by the cellist Jan Burian and the pianist Bedřich Křídlo. Both compositions have been preserved in the estate of the cellist Bedřich Váška, the dedicatee of the Serenade, in copies made by the composer’s father, Josef Suk the Eldest (1827–1913), a teacher in the village of Křečovice.

On 22 January 1934, Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was presented for the first time in Leningrad. Two days later, the Moscow premiere took place at the Nemirovich Danchenko Theater, and it immediately attracted interest abroad. The opera was played for two years, also at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. In January 1935, its performance was attended by Joseph Stalin. As a result, Shostakovich got into the first conflict with the aesthetic line dictated by the state. The Pravda newspaper published an article entitled Muddle Instead of Music concerning his opera, whose headline Shostakovich reportedly noticed while being on a concert tour with the cellist Viktor Kubatsky. One of the pieces on their program was Sonata for Cello and Piano in D minor, Op. 40, dedicated to Kubatsky, which they premiered together on 25 December 1935 in the Leningrad Philharmonic’s Small Hall. Shostakovich wrote the sonata in the summer of 1934, the busy and hopeful period after the opera’s premiere when the world was learning about the young Russian composer. While retaining the traditional Classical-Romantic formal scheme, the sonata already bears the hallmarks of Shostakovich’s style, characterized by parodic elements and a tendency towards the grotesque. The first movement is reminiscent of the music of Romantic bourgeois salons. The composer assigns an extensive cantilena to cello accompanied by piano chords; in the development, the composer’s above-mentioned ability to lighten up can be felt. In the mirror recapitulation – i.e., with the reverse sequence of the two themes – the main theme is distorted and the end of the movement is melancholic, like a memory of times gone by. Allegro forms a contrast, a humorous exaggeration, sounding deliberately almost trivial at times. The somber, elegiac slow movement brings about another sharp contrast, giving the impression of resignation, but irony flashes through. The final movement, which according to the established canon of forms should represent a resolution of the conflicts raised in the previous movements, toys with these ideas, for example, by several mechanical repetitions of the motif in the very end.