Festival debuts, returns of famous personalities, elite orchestras and world premieres will be offered by the jubilee 80th year of the Prague Spring festival. It will traditionally start on May 12 next year and last until June 3. The newly published program shows an effort to proudly continue the rich history that has given Czechs the opportunity to meet top foreign bodies and rising stars since 1946.
Since then, the show has presented over 4,500 concerts, at which more than ten thousand songs were played. “Every year crowds of interesting personalities and first-class ensembles pass through the festival, that’s why we decided to celebrate the eightieth year in the best spirit of these traditions. There are great returns of legends and discoveries of the Czech and foreign scene,” summarizes director Pavel Trojan. The program will once again include the entire spectrum of genres, from early music to top works of romanticism to contemporary novelties.
A large delegation from the USA
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra will come to the Czech Republic for the first time, and on May 20 in the Municipal House, under the baton of Dutchman Jaap van Zweden, they will perform Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.
The performance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which will be conducted there on May 14 by the Latvian chief conductor Andris Nelsons, will also be closely watched. A compatriot, violinist Baiba Skride, will also arrive with him to play Dmitri Shostakovich’s first violin concerto. The famous Russian composer is one of the big names in the history of the festival. He already participated in the second year, where he played his chamber compositions in the role of pianist. This happened in 1947, just when he started sketching a violin concerto.
Other attractions of the orchestra series will be the London Symphony Orchestra, which will visit Prague Spring after two decades with its new chief conductor Antonio Pappano, the arrival of the Tokyo NHK Symphony Orchestra, which performed here for the first and last time in 1983, or a performance by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. They will be under the baton of new chief conductor Petr Popelka for the first time in front of a home audience.
Pavel Trojan is the director of the Prague Spring festival from 2022. | Photo: CTK
The orchestra of period instruments Concentus Musicus Wien, founded and led by the now deceased Nikolaus Harnoncourt for over sixty years, will also be heading here from Austria. With the conductor Tomáš Netopil, he will perform the famous Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The festival has not been played for 15 years.
“We were striving for a truly reference performance of this work, so we waited a long time for the right moment. It has arrived just now. The orchestra has Mozart’s music in its DNA and Tomáš Netopil shows an incredible feeling for the music of classicism,” says Pavel Trojan, according to whom it will be one of the highlights of the year. “Petr Popelka and Tomáš Netopil are Czechs who have established themselves abroad, and we are proud to be able to present them with foreign ensembles at the Prague Spring,” he adds.
Many talents made their Czech debuts at the festival, to which next year, for example, Santtu‑Matias Rouvali, the thirty-eight-year-old chief conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, will join. Another of the great personalities of the strong Finnish conducting school is also at the helm of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 2021. The soloist of the evening planned for May 23 will be the young Canadian-Polish pianist Jan Lisiecki, already known to the audience.
Antonello Manacorda, a rising conductor star of classical and early romantic music, will be introduced to the Czechs for the first time a day earlier. At the festival, he will end his fifteen-year career as artistic director of the Kammerakademie Potsdam orchestra. Together they will offer a Beethoven program with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
The following Monday, May 26, the French early music group Ensemble Correspondances will let the audience smell the operas created for Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV during their debut at the Prague Spring.
Despite history
The anniversary year wants to remind that modern history passed through the Prague Spring. Its creation in 1946 was accompanied by enthusiasm from the end of the Second World War and the joy of freedom shared by the personalities of social life in the first years.
The festival was initiated by Rafael Kubelík, then chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic. Patronage was provided by President Edvard Beneš. He thus established a tradition that heads of state maintain to this day – the current president Petr Pavel also entered the presidential box to the sound of festive fanfare at this year’s opening ceremony on May 12 in the Smetana Hall of the Municipal House.
Conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein (left) in 1946 at the Prague Spring with President Edvard Beneš. | Photo: CTK
The organizers have set a high bar since the first years. The Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovič performed here as a twenty-year-old young man, the Austrian pianist Friedrich Gulda first introduced himself to the Czechs at the age of seventeen, and the audience also experienced Svyatoslav Richter, later one of the best pianists of the 20th century, in the early stages of his career.
The visits of the American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein in 1946 and 1947 were particularly memorable. “The Prague Spring was the scene of his European debut. He was actually a relatively young conductor at the time and, according to contemporary testimonies, he made a great impression. On the occasion of the jubilee, we searched in historical sources and in We found a telegram to the US Library of Congress in which he enthusiastically writes home from Prague,” mentions Pavel Trojan.
When Bernstein returned to the first post-revolutionary Prague Spring in 1990 after forty years of communist totalitarianism, the festival audience witnessed his last European performance. He died in mid-October of the same year.
His footprint will be remembered next year not only by visiting orchestras from Chicago and Boston. Bernstein’s composition Divertimento will be heard on May 28 at the Debut of Prague Spring, where the winner of this year’s International Music Competition Prague Spring will also perform under the baton of Jan Sedláček. The young Japanese violinist Tsukushi Sasaki will be accompanied by the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra.
A symbolic beginning and end
The most frequent festival performers include the Czech Philharmonic, which played My Homeland with Rafael Kubelík for the first time on May 12, 1946. Since then, she has performed 432 concerts at the Prague Spring, with only Mou vlast on the program, including reruns, sixty-six times.
“The memorable festival performances of My Homeland include not only the first one with Rafael Kubelík, but also others with chief conductors Karel Ančerl, Václav Neumann, Zdeňek Mácal or Jiří Bělohlávek, including the unforgettable return of Rafael Kubelík in the tumultuous post-revolutionary atmosphere of 1990,” explains Pavel Trojan, why he entrusted the opening of the 80th edition to the first Czech orchestra. He will present My Homeland with the current chief conductor Semjon Byčkov.
Rafael Kubelík and his unforgettable return to the Prague Spring in the frenzied post-revolutionary atmosphere of 1990. | Photo: CTK
The Czech Philharmonic will also symbolically close next year with the monumental Symphony of a Thousand by Gustav Mahler, where top Czech and foreign singers will join together in the spirit of the festival’s mission.
According to playwright Josef Třeštík, Mahler is traditionally an important composer for the Prague Spring. “He created the gigantic Eighth Symphony in ten weeks, when, according to his wife Alma, he composed it as if he had a fever. The two performances at the Prague Spring will offer a truly exceptionally impressive singing cast, including two great Mahler experts. Sarah Wegener will come, who sang the Eighth under the baton of Kirill Petrenka and Kenta Nagana, or Gramophone award winner Jennifer Johnston,” he mentions.
Josef Třeštík has been the dramaturg of the Prague Spring festival since 2019. | Photo: CTK
The tenor part will be performed by the British singing star David Butt Philip, who has already successfully debuted in London’s Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera or the New York Met. “And two top Czech singers, Kateřina Kněžíková and Adam Plachetka, will not be missing,” adds the playwright.
In addition to respect for tradition, the festival will not forget the future of Czech music even in 2025. It will give space to young artists and ensembles, and has also commissioned world premieres of new compositions. “Prague Spring, as one of the few platforms in the Czech Republic, tries to consistently and thoughtfully take care not only of the historical legacy, but also of the future of Czech music and performing arts,” notes Pavel Trojan.
Prague Offspring will take place for the fourth time, bringing the wider public closer to the behind-the-scenes of the world of contemporary music. It was created during the coronavirus pandemic and its venue was the Dox Contemporary Art Center in Holešovice, where visitors intensively meet for several days during concerts, lectures, discussions and master classes. “Currently, five new compositions by Czech and Slovak authors are being created for him, which is a relatively unheard of number by Czech standards,” mentions Trojan.
The organizers approached, for example, the young composer Haštal Hapka, the son of the late composer of popular and film music Petr Hapka. “He’s following in his father’s footsteps, albeit in a different genre,” notes Trojan.
Other authors composing for the festival are Jan Ryant Drízal, Barbora Tomášková, Pavel Šabacký and Slavomír Hořínka, whose nearly half-hour long composition Grain, chaff and fire was created directly for the Frankfurt Ensemble Modern. It will become the Prague Offspring’s resident ensemble for three seasons, until 2027. Hořínek’s composition was inspired by biblical parables and the ideas of the French religious thinker Teilhard de Chardin.
“We will also remember the legacy of the composer Luboš Fišer in the excellent interpretation of the resident artist of the festival, Patricia Kopatchinská, which I consider a huge tribute to Czech music and to this author. Most of us perceive him only as the composer of the soundtrack to the films Death of Beautiful Deer or Adéla has not dined yet, but not as one of the best and most original Czech composers of the 20th century,” concludes Pavel Trojan.