Smetana Litomyšl Festival • David Robertson

With an innate musicality and overwhelming talent, Seong-Jin Cho has established himself worldwide as one of the leading pianists of his generation and most distinctive artists on the current music scene. His thoughtful and poetic, assertive and tender, virtuosic and colourful playing can combine panache with purity and is driven by an impressive natural sense of balance.

Seong-Jin Cho was brought to the world’s attention in 2015 when he won First Prize at the Chopin International Competition in Warsaw, and his career has rapidly ascended since. In January 2016, he signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon. An artist high in demand, Cho works with the world's most prestigious orchestras including Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker, London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, New York Philharmonic and The Philadelphia Orchestra. Conductors he regularly collaborates with include Myung-Whun Chung, Gustavo Dudamel, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Andris Nelsons, Gianandrea Noseda, Sir Simon Rattle, Santtu Matias Rouvali and Esa-Pekka Salonen.

An active recitalist very much in demand, Seong-Jin Cho performs in many of the world’s most prestigious concert halls. During the coming season he is engaged to perform solo recitals at the likes of Carnegie Hall, Boston Celebrity Series, Walt Disney Hall, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Liederhalle Stuttgart, at Laeiszhalle Hamburg, Berliner Philharmonie, Musikverein Wien and he debuts in recital at the Barbican London. 

Seong-Jin Cho’s recordings have garnered impressive critical acclaim worldwide. The most recent one is of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Scherzi with the London Symphony Orchestra and Gianandrea Noseda, having previously recorded Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 as well as the Four Ballades with the same orchestra and conductor. His latest solo album titled The Wanderer was released in May 2020. 

Born in 1994 in Seoul, Seong-Jin Cho started learning the piano at the age of six and gave his first public recital aged 11. In 2009, he became the youngest-ever winner of Japan’s Hamamatsu International Piano Competition. In 2011, he won Third Prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at the age of 17. From 2012–2015 he studied with Michel Béroff at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris. Seong-Jin Cho is now based in Berlin.

David Robertson – conductor, artist, thinker, and American musical visionary – occupies some of the most prominent platforms on the international music scene. A highly sought-after podium figure in the worlds of opera, orchestral music, and new music, Robertson is celebrated worldwide as a champion of contemporary composers, an ingenious and adventurous programmer, and a masterful communicator whose passionate advocacy for the art form is widely recognized. A consummate and deeply collaborative musician, Robertson is hailed for his intensely committed music making.

Building upon his dynamic association with The Metropolitan Opera, Robertson conducts the Met’s 2019/2020 season opening production of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, directed by James Robinson, and featuring Eric Owens and Angel Blue. On the podium for all fourteen performances of the opera, through early February 2020, David Robertson also returns to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to complete his 2019 valedictory season as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director with American and French music of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Robertson will continue to conduct the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in future seasons as the city undertakes a major renovation of its beloved Sydney Opera House.

In Fall 2019, David Robertson joins the newly formed Tianjin Juilliard Advisory Council, an international body created to guide the young Chinese campus of the Juilliard School, complementing his role as Director of Conducting Studies, Distinguished Visiting Faculty. In the 2019/2020 season, Robertson continues his prolific collaboration with composer John Adams, conducting performances of his opera-oratorio El Niño with the Houston Symphony. In addition to numerous international musical endeavors this season, Robertson returns to the Staatskapelle Dreden and Czech Philharmonic, and conducts the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, the New Japan Philharmonic, and, in New York, The Juilliard Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

In 2018, David Robertson completed his transformative 13-year tenure as Music Director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, where he solidified the orchestra’s status as one of the nation’s most enduring and innovative. For the SLSO, he established fruitful relationships with a wide spectrum of artists, and garnered a 2014 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance for the Nonesuch release of John Adams’ City Noir. Completing the historic Robertson-SLSO association, two final recordings were released in 2019: Wynton Marsalis’ Swing Symphony, with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, on Blue Engine Records; and Mozart Piano Concertos, No. 17 in G Major, K.453 and No. 24 in C Minor, K.491, with Orli Shaham, on Canaray Classics.

In addition to Sydney and St. Louis, Robertson has served in artistic leadership positions at musical institutions including the Orchestre National de Lyon, and, as a protégé of Pierre Boulez, the Ensemble InterContemporain, which he led on its first North American tour. At the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he served as Principal Guest Conductor. Robertson has served as a Perspectives Artist at Carnegie Hall, where he has conducted, among others, The Met Orchestra, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. He appears regularly in Europe with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunk, the Dresden Staatskapelle, and at the Berlin Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, the BBC Proms, and the Musica Viva Festival in Munich.

Robertson’s longstanding relationship with the Met Opera includes the premiere of Phelim McDermott’s celebrated Spring 2018 production of Così fan tutte, set in 1950s Coney Island. Since his Met debut in 1996, with The Makropulos Case, he has conducted a breathtaking range of Met projects, including the Met premiere of John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer (2014); the 2016 revival of Janáček’s Jenůfa, then its first Met performances in nearly a decade; the premiere production of Nico Muhly’s Two Boys (2013); and many favorites, from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro to Britten’s Billy Budd. Robertson has frequent projects at the world’s most prestigious opera houses, including La Scala, Théâtre du Châtelet, Bayerische Staatsoper (orchestra), the San Francisco Opera, and the Santa Fe Opera.

Robertson is the recipient of numerous musical and artistic awards, and in 2010 was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Government of France. He is devoted to supporting young musicians and has worked with students at the festivals of Aspen, Tanglewood, Lucerne, at the Paris Conservatoire, Music Academy of the West, and the National Orchestral Institute. In 2014, he led the Coast to Coast tour of Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra of the USA.

Born in Santa Monica, California, David Robertson was educated at London’s Royal Academy of Music, where he studied horn and composition before turning to orchestral conducting. He is married to pianist Orli Shaham, and lives in New York.

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.

In 1912, Igor Stravinsky was also 30 years old. 59 more years of life were still ahead of him, and he was at work on his most daring work to date. He was known to all of Paris, the centre of the artistic avant-garde at the time. Paris is also where the progressive Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev had been working since 1909. His ensemble’s productions of Stravinsky’s ballets The Firebird and Petrushka had been the talk of Paris, but the greatest event was yet to come. On 29 May 1913, the newly opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées gave the premiere of his third ballet, The Rite of Spring, subtitled Picture of Pagan Russia. A riot ensued, pitting the disapproving, disgusted conservative part of the audience against enthusiastic progressives. Nothing would ever be the same again—not only the music, but also the choreography and costumes differed from anything that had come before.

 “The idea of The Rite of Spring came to me while I was still composing Firebird,” recalled Igor Stravinsky 45 years after the work’s premiere in his book Conversations. “I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” In the summer of 1911 in Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), Stravinsky signed a contract with Diaghilev for the composing of the last of his three early ballets. He worked on the composition in 1911 and 1912, and he made the final revisions in March 1913. To prepare himself to compose the music, Stravinsky joined the stage designer and scenario author Nicholas Roerich, who was also an archaeologist, on a trip to the Russian town Talashkino near Smolensk to study the rituals of Slavic tribes at a local centre for the folk arts. Rather than using specific folk themes, they were interested in archetypes—the mystical, wild, primitive, and uncivilised—that they would present in opposition to the bourgeois conventions of the day and to excessive sensitivity in the arts.

Stravinsky did not borrow any specific Russian folk songs, but The Rite of Spring is still the high point of his creative period under the influence of folklore. The only actual folk melody in The Rite of Spring is played by the bassoon at the very beginning, but the composer later said that the tune was not Russian—it supposedly came from an anthology of Lithuanian folk music that he found in Warsaw. In 1943, Stravinsky’s contemporary Béla Bartók, himself a folklore enthusiastic, called The Rite of Spring “the apotheosis of the music of rural Russia”, and about the ballet he declared: “Rhythmic cells that contract and expand can be found commonly in the music of Russia and eastern Europe.”

For Stravinsky, the character of the theme opened up incredible musical possibilities, particularly in the use of the power of elementary rhythm with the whole orchestra acting as a gigantic percussion instrument employing fierce rhythmic pulsation, polyrhythm, and the rapid alternation of metres. Later, Stravinsky recalled playing the beginning of the composition for Diaghilev for the first time at the piano. “Diaghilev asked if those repeated chords would go on much longer. And I answered ‘until the end, my dear’” Also in terms of tonality, The Rite of Spring went beyond tradition with hints of bitonality and tritonality, as Stravinsky superimposes chords separated by as little as a semitone.

Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography was also in keeping with the totally revolutionary conception of the music. The dancers’ primitive movements were entirely contrary to the aesthetic ideals of classical ballet. In hindsight, the choreography and Nijinsky’s rather inadequate comprehension of the innovative music could be chiefly blamed for the failure of the work’s premiere. A year later, a concert performance of The Rite of Spring in Paris met with public acclaim, and the work became a definitive milestone on the path towards modern music.