R5 / Rachmaninoff – Prokofiev – Deutsch • Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra

The Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra will be led by South Korean conductor Han-Na Chang, currently chief conductor of the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra in Norway. Her musical background is in cello, which she studied in the USA in the 1990s with Mstislav Rostropovich, an exiled Russian cellist and conductor. She debuted as a conductor much later, in 2007. For her Czech premiere, she will present a new composition called Phantasma by contemporary Austrian composer Bernd Richard Deutsch. The composer was inspired by Gustav Klimt’s famous Beethoven Frieze of 1902, which depicts the Ninth Symphony and its famous Ode to Joy with elaborate artistic devices. Deutsch’s imaginative use of a large orchestra can be seen by the listener as the musical equivalent of Klimt’s use of colour. The next part of the concert features two magnificent scores by Russian classical composers from the first half of the 20th century. Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is a virtuoso work conceived in the spirit of the composer’s piano concertos. The fifth of Sergei Prokofiev’s seven symphonies, his best known, most accessible and most popular, dates from 1944, the penultimate year of the Second World War. Prokofiev himself described it as “a hymn to free and happy man, to his mighty powers, to his pure and noble spirit”. It reminds us of the fundamental difference between the two composers, who both reacted to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 by emigrating to the West. Rachmaninoff never returned to his homeland, but Prokofiev was tempted by the Soviet regime to return in the 1930s.

The evening concert will be broadcasted by Český rozhlas Vltava.