Czech Philharmonic • Antonio Pappano

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 gifts of the Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson include perfect pitch and the phenomenon of musical synaesthesia (he “hears” colours). In recent years, he has earned recognition as the world’s “new superstar of classical piano”, as the Daily Telegraph has called him. Critics acclaim his exceptional technical skill and boundless virtuosity, but above all they emphasise his innovative approach to musical interpretation, thanks to which his has been nicknamed “Iceland’s Glenn Gould” (as he was first called by the New York Times). Like Gould, Ólafsson is able to see even very familiar works with new eyes, find their hidden qualities, and arrive at conceptions that are entirely new and yet natural and sensitive.

He demonstrated this most recently with a new CD of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, issued by Deutsche Grammophon in October 2023. “I have dreamed of recording this work for 25 years” says Ólafsson, who devoted an entire concert season to this already successful album, presenting his original interpretation of that masterpiece live on a world tour appearing on six continents to perform at such halls as Carnegie Hall, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, the Zurich Tonhalle, the Philharmonie de Paris, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, and Prague’s Rudolfinum. 

Already in the past, his mastery earned him many awards, such as the title Artist of the Year 2019 awarded by the magazine Gramophone, and his recordings twice earned him the Opus Klassik prize and Album of the Year 2019 from the BBC Music Magazine. Among his most popular albums with the critics and the public, which he recorded on the Deutsche Grammophon label, have been Philip Glass Piano Works (2017), Johann Sebastian Bach (2018), Debussy – Rameau (2020), and Mozart & Contemporaries (2021).

Born in Reykjavik, he got his start at the piano under his mother’s guidance. “As a child, I saw the piano as a toy,” admits Ólafsson, adding that he has been able to preserve that playful approach to some extent not only as a student at the Juilliard School, but even to this day.

The standing of Sir Antonio Pappano, a conductor adorned by multiple honours and awards, including the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, the Order of the British Empire and the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society, is perhaps best illustrated by his current situation. This season, after more than two decades, he will leave the post of music director of the world-renowned Royal Opera House in London (to be succeeded by the Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša) and assume the role of chief conductor of the prestigious London Symphony Orchestra. Can one rise any higher?

One of the presently most sought-after opera and concert conductors, Sir Antonio Pappano was born in 1959 in Epping, Essex, into a family who had moved to England from Italy. When he was 13 years of age, they relocated to Connecticut. The son of a distinguished voice teacher, he did not attend any music school, taking private lessons instead. After completing his training in piano (with Norma Verrilli), composition (with Arnold Franchetti) and conducting (with Gustav Meier), Sir Antonio worked as a pianist and rehearsal accompanist at opera houses in Europe and the USA. While at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, he attracted the attention of maestro Daniel Barenboim, who would name the gifted young artist his assistant. Following his first conducting experience, in Oslo, at the age of 31 Sir Antonio was appointed music director of Den Norske Opera. He served as music director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, principal guest conductor of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and music director of the Orchestra dellʼAccademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome.

In 2019, he and the Orchestra dellʼAccademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia appeared to great acclaim at the Prague Spring festival, and last season he performed in the subscription concerts of the Czech Philharmonic.

Sir Antonio Pappano’s wide-ranging discography primarily includes opera albums, yet he has also made numerous recordings of symphonic music, mostly by Romantic composers, as well as other works, with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Berliner Philharmoniker and other feted orchestras. Since 1995, Sir Antonio has extensively recorded for Warner Classics.

Besides the Royal Opera House in London, where he has conducted productions of operas ranging from Baroque to contemporary, Sir Antonio Pappano has recently appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Wiener Staatsoper, the Staatsoper Berlin and Milan’s La Scala, as well as at the Bayreuther Festspiele. 

The biographers of Ludwig van Beethoven usually divide his works into three stylistic periods. The middle one has come to be described as the “heroic period”. That ten-year era of the composer’s life is framed symbolically by a pair of letters that were never sent, in which Beethoven gave vent to his innermost feelings and thoughts. The first of them dates from the autumn of 1802 while the composer was staying in Heiligenstadt, then a quiet suburb of Vienna, where he had taken refuge about half a year earlier. The unsatisfactory results of attempts to reverse his worsening tinnitus and advancing loss of hearing caused him to fall into a deepening state of depression, and it was in this state of mind that he wrote what is known as the Heiligenstadt Testament. The moving letter, originally intended for Beethoven’s two younger brothers, expresses the worries of the 32-year-old composer and pianist over his worsening health and over his earlier contemplation of ending his own life, but writing it had a cathartic effect. Beethoven banished his dark thoughts, returned to Vienna, and devoted himself fully to composing. The period that followed brought major works of the composer’s oeuvre: the Eroica, the Fifth Symphony, the Pastoral Symphony, the Violin Concerto in D major, the Triple Concerto for violin, piano, and cello, and great piano sonatas like the Appassionata and Les Adieux. The second of the letters in question was written ten years later in Teplice, a town in northern Bohemia, while Beethoven was staying at the local spa. “Good morning on 7 July. Already while still in bed, my thoughts turn to you, my immortal beloved. Now and then happily, and then sadly waiting to see whether fate will hear our pleas. I can live only wholly with you or not at all”, the composer wrote to his “immortal beloved”, whose identity remains the subject of speculation.

Another product of Beethoven’s “heroic period” was his Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat major (1809). It is not entirely clear how the last of his five piano concertos got the nickname “Emperor”. The probable source was the English publisher Johann Baptist Cramer, and it is far more likely that the designation refers to the work’s musical grandiosity than to any particular emperor. While Beethoven was completing work on the concerto, which he dedicated to Archduke Rudolf, his friend and patron for many years, he was certainly being influenced by dramatic external circumstances. Vienna had been under siege by Napoleon’s troops for several months, and matters came to a head in early July with the bloody Battle of Wagram, Austria’s defeat, and the subsequent signing of a peace treaty that had far-reaching financial consequences for Austria and meant an enormous loss of territory. At the end of July, Beethoven wrote to his publisher: “The entire course of events has affected me body and soul. How disturbing and wild life is around me; nothing but drums, cannons, men, and every kind of misery.” While the city was under siege, Beethoven hid in the cellar of his brother’s house, and to keep from losing the rest of his already poor hearing, he used pillows to protect his ears from the noise of the battle.

Beethoven’s worsening hearing did not at all hinder his composing, but appearing in public in the role of a performer became more and more difficult for him. The Piano Concerto in E flat major is his first and only piano concerto that he did not himself premiere. The whole work’s character is truly grand, and the very first movement reveals how meaningfully Beethoven influenced the entire piano concerto genre, whether in terms of the dominance given to the piano, which asserts itself at full power from the very first bars, or the final cadenza, which Beethoven himself composed, contrary to what had been previously customary, insisting that it always be performed in precisely that form. In his concertos, Beethoven perfectly mastered the classical forms, opening the door to the gradual arrival of the world of Romanticism, where a musical work is conceived as the perfect reflection of the composer’s imagination, which the performer is to convey to the listener. The opening bars of the concerto sound forth like monumental fanfares, followed immediately by solo piano entrances in runs of scales and arpeggios. Following the opening fanfares are military motifs symbolised by a dotted rhythm or the emphatic sound of the timpani and a march theme played by the French horns. The majestic first movement is followed by a slow Adagio that sounds in places like a touching nocturne. The gentle solo piano line is accompanied by the soft sound of the strings, woodwinds, and muted French horns. As the chord dies away at the end of the second movement, the soloist plays a pianissimo entrance with a new theme. For two more bars, the movement’s slow pulse is maintained, but then a fortissimo solo entrance announces the virtuosic and energetic Rondo, which follows the previous movement without a pause. The end of the third movement also exhibits Beethoven’s imaginativeness. The composer first allows the final cadenza to die away, then in the last bars, runs of scales played forte offer contrast, and the finale is capped off decisively by repeated chords played by the full orchestra.