The final concert of the Bamberg Symphony on 16 October will take place in the form of a live stream from the concert hall in Bamberg to our website. Concert without spectators in the theater.

Jakub Hrůša, the Principal Conductor, says: “The participation at the Janáček Brno festival with the Bamberg Symphony in my hometown was the key project of the season for me and my orchestra, in which we invested a lot of effort and emotion during the programme creation and preparation. Unfortunately, the health situation in the Czech Republic has made it impossible to physically get to Brno with the whole orchestra. Yet, of our own initiative and with great understanding of the festival management, we will play for our audience. I am happy that in spite of the adverse circumstances, we have managed to organize a virtual live stream of the concert, unchanged. During our performance in Bamberg, we will give it everything and in our minds we will be with you in the Czech Republic. The timeless music of Leoš Janáček and Richard Strauss will help us bridge the distance.”

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928): Great Suite from the Opera The Cunnning Little Vixen (adapted Jakub Hrůša)

Richard Strauss (1864–1949): An Alpine Symphony, op. 64

This concert by the Bamberger Symphoniker under the leadership of their chief conductor Jakub Hrůša will present the works of two generationally related authors and their perspectives on the countryside, which are very different from one other.

It was probably the fact that such an exceptional composer as Leoš Janáček composed only a few works for the symphony orchestra that led conductors, soon after Janáček´s death, to adapt his opera scores into opera suites which could be performed at symphonic concerts. The first such suite was created from the opera The Cunning Little Vixen by the excellent conductor Václav Talich, but only using music from Act 1. In 2017, the conductor Jakub Hrůša decided to use the purely orchestral passages to create a Grand Suite from the same opera. He was well aware of the fact that orchestral music without singing forms more than a third of the whole piece. He created a suite which follows the plot of the opera chronologically and covers the parts intended for the orchestra. The result is more than excellent and helps us to realize just how distinctive, impressive and engaging the orchestral component of the opera which Janáček composed in 1922-24 is. This extensive orchestral suite will be performed Brno for the first time.

An Alpine Symphony is one of the less frequently performed symphonic poems by Richard Strauss, who composed it during the war years of 1914–15. After his Symphonia Domestica he decided that from then on he would only compose for the opera, but fortunately he didn´t stick to his resolution. He had a beautiful view of the alpine peak Zugspitze and the mighty Wetterstein Mountains from the window of his country house in Garmisch, and he decided to transfer this natural scenery into the score. With the symphony Strauss wished to create an impressive alpine musical panorama describing exclusively visible facts rather than a work exploring our spiritual relationship to nature. His musical painting is an exceptional work: in the score we can find cow bells and at one point the instruments are used to simulate a storm. When the symphony was first introduced in Berlin, the reviewers called it an idyll (just as Janáček called The Cunning Little Vixen a “forest idyll”) and commented on the presence of a certain simplicity or naivety that was unexpected of Strauss. The author himself commented on the work with the words: “For once I wanted to compose like a cow giving milk.”

Author: Jiří Zahrádka

https://www.yumpu.com/cs/document/read/64542108/mfjb-2020-klavirni-recital-jana-bartose

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928): 1. X. 1905 (From the Street, 1st October 1905), JW VIII/19

On an Overgrown Path, series 1, 2, JW VIII/17

Thema con variazioni, JW VIII/6

In the Mists, JW VIII/22

A piano recital by one of the most gifted pianists of the younger generation is always one of the highlights of festival concerts. Jan Bartoš recorded and published Janáček´s complete piano works with Supraphon in 2019, and immediately received accolades from foreign reviewers, such as the prestigious Editor´s Choice award from Gramophone magazine.

The composition 1. X. 1905 (“From the Street, 1st October 1905”) was created spontaneously as a reaction to a tragedy which took place during demonstrations for a Czech university in Brno. After years of efforts to establish a Czech higher education institution in Brno, the government agreed that Brno citizens should be allowed to decide for themselves about whether a Czech university should be created or not. However, as Brno was predominantly German, the German representatives of the city were afraid of Czechs gaining greater influence and so convened a “Volkstag” in Brno on 1st October 1905. German associations and organizations from far and wide were invited to demonstrate their opposition to the foundation of a Czech University in Brno. In response, the Czech citizens of the city organized a large anti-German demonstration. Street fights took place between the two camps, and the police and subsequently also the army were called in. During one of the battles, a young Czech worker named František Pavlík was killed. Filled with impressions from this tragic event, Janáček sat down to write the originally three-movement composition From the Street, I. X. 1905. However, shortly before its premiere on 27th January 1906 he burnt the last movement, and after another performance in Prague he even threw the whole manuscript into the Vltava River. Fortunately, the first performer of the composition, the pianist Ludmila Tučková, kept the original copy and made it public quite some time later, in 1924. Thanks to her, this piano piece, forgotten by Janáček for many years, has been preserved.

The piano cycle of poetic compositions On an Overgrown Path was created gradually during 1900, 1908 and 1911. Janáček wrote the first five compositions of the first series of the cycle in 1900. They were published by a teacher from Ivančice, Emil Kolář, as small compositions for the harmonium in several books for music students entitled Slavonic Melodies. The editor, Jan Branberger, played a role in popularising the cycle when he arranged for the compositions to be printed by a Prague publisher, Bedřich Kočí, in 1908. The interest of publishers in the compositions led Janáček to the creation of other parts, and so the cycle grew to comprise a total of ten pieces, to which the composer assigned poetic titles. On 30^th September 1911, shortly before the first series of the cycle was published by Píša´s publishing house, Janáček released the first composition from a new series of the cycle On an Overgrown Path in the Večery fiction section of the Lidové noviny newspaper, this time without a poetic name. The printed source was based on Sedláček´s undated copy containing a total of three numbered compositions, all without a name, the last of which is basically a sketch that Bartoš, for obvious reasons, did not include in the second series.

Janáček greatly valued the piano compositions Thema con variazioni (or also Zdenka Variations) at the time of its creation, and he even labelled them Opus No. 1, even though he had composed many other pieces before. The creation of this composition dates to the beginning of 1880, i.e. to the period when the composer was studying at the Conservatory in Leipzig. He wrote the piece under the direction of his professor, Leo Grill, and dedicated it to his fiancée Zdenka Schulzová. For the young Janáček it was an important work in which he tested his ability to compose in the style of Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Liszt or Brahms.

Janáček completed his piano cycle In the Mists in April 1912. Not a long time before, in 1910, he had moved to a new house in the garden of Brno’s organ school with his wife and maid, and there, hiding from the world, with broken self-confidence and in a melancholy mood, he composed his last more extensive work for solo piano. He worked on it shortly after listening to piano compositions by the French composer Claude Debussy, and it is no coincidence that his dreamlike melancholic work contains elements of musical impressionism. The cycle In the Mists won the first prize in a contest for composers run by the Club of Friends of Art, which was supposed to publish the winning work. However, Janáček left the opportunity to have a composition published to his pupil, Jaroslav Kvapil, who came second in the contest. In the Mists was played for the first time by Marie Dvořáková in Kroměříž on 7^th December 1913.

Author: Jiří Zahrádka

Charles Ives – Symphony No. 3 „ The Camp Meeting”

Leoš Janáček: Adagio for orchestra

Arvo Pärt – Symphony No. 3

The gallery of the Basilica of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Old Brno was a very significant place for Janáček. He was raised in the Augustinian abbey from the age of 11, sang as a choral scholar in the Old Brno basilica gallery, and subsequently also played the organ there. After Pavel Křížkovský left for Olomouc, Janáček became the director of the choir in 1872.

Autor: Jiří Zahrádka

Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959): String Quartet No. 7, „Concerto da camera“ H 314

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928): Quartet inspired by L. N. Tolstoy´s “Kreutzer Sonata”, JW VII/8

Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904): String Quintet No. 3. in E flat major, Op. 97

The Quartet inspired by L. N. Tolstoy´s “Kreutzer Sonata” dates from 1923. However, the beginnings of the composition date back to 1908, when Janáček composed the now missing Piano trio, inspired by Tolstoy´s novel. Janáček used the musical material from the trio later during the composition of the first string quartet. He dedicated it to the famous Czech Quartet, which performed its premiere on 17^th October 1924. The seventy-year-old author attained great success with this work. For example, in 1925 it was performed at the International Festival of the Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) in Venice.

The String Quintet No. 3 in E flat major is one of the most highly regarded chamber compositions by the world famous Antonín Dvořák. He composed it in 1893 during his stay in America. The piece was created in the immediate vicinity of the String Quartet in F major during his holiday stay in Spillville. It is a work of immense originality inspired by his time in America, and it is characterized by the use of pentatonic, syncopated rhythms and a hint of Indian folklore. At the same time, the composition is very dense and expressive thanks to the extended instrumental composition. The String Quartet had its premiere on 12^th January 1894 in New York, performed by the Kneisl Quartet with Max Zach playing the second viola. The work was first played live in Prague on 10^th October 1894 by the Czech Quartet with Ferdinand Lachner.

Author: Jiří Zahrádka

Leoš Janáček: Pohádka (Fairy Tale) for cello and piano

Leoš Janáček: In the Mists

Leoš Janáček: Youth

For the fourth time, the Faculty of Music of the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts will present a programme prepared by its students at the Janáček festival. The intention is to present – in an unconventional manner – interesting and artistic student activities as well as the individual study specialization areas, which the usual concert visitors are unfamiliar with. The audience will have the opportunity to hear performances by young artists.

Author: Monika Holá

The performance of Salome on 10 October will be replaced by an extraordinary concert of the Orchestra of the Janáček Opera of the National Theatre Brno under the baton of the conductor Robert Kružík with a programme consisting of the works of Leoš Janáček, with a special guest, the exceptional violinist Josef Špaček.

PERFORMING:

JOSEF ŠPAČEK – VIOLIN

MIROSLAV SEKERA – PIANO

ROBERT KRUŽÍK – CONDUCTOR

JANÁČEK OPERA ORCHESTRA NdB

PROGRAM:

LEOŠ JANÁČEK:

JELLOWNESS (INTRODUCTION TO HER SHEPHERD), JW VI / 2

VIOLIN CONCERT OF TRAVELING TUBBLE, JW IX / 10

FOR SOLO VIOLINS AND ORCHESTRA

STRING SUIT, JW VI / 2

SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO, JW VII / 7

LAŠSKÉ DANCE, JW VI / 17

Václav Dobiáš – Nursery Rhymes for Nonet, with the film It Was the First of May by Thea Červenková (1919)

Leoš Janáček: Concertino JW VII/11 for piano, two violins, viola, clarinet, French horn and bassoon

Martin Smolka: Hats in the sky (together with the film Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts Before Breakfast)by Hans Richter (1928)

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971): Pulcinella – suite for orchestra (1919/1920, rev. 1949)

The ballet Pulcinella by Igor Stravinsky is the exact opposite of Pierrot lunaire. The author had begun living outside Russia before World War I, mostly in France and Switzerland. In Paris he became close to Sergei Diaghilev, a promoter of Russian art and the organizer of the Russian Ballet, with which leading modern composers (Debussy, Satie, Poulenc, Prokofiev) and artists (Picasso, de Chirico, Braque, Matisse) cooperated. Stravinsky wrote his first ballet scores for Dagilev´s ensemble: The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, works of groundbreaking significance not only within the composer’s oeuvre but in terms of European music in general. The new, expressively aggressive sound of Stravinsky´s music of this period, where the rhythm is placed above melody and harmony, culminates in the ballet The Rite of Spring, whose premiere in 1913 ended in a legendary scandal. The sung ballet Pulcinella from 1919 was also made to order for Diaghilev´s Russian Ballet. However, there was a change in Stravinsky´s work at the end of the 1920s. Instead of unrestrainedly rhythmic “barbaric” scores, works of a more ‘chamber’ nature were born, marking a turn towards neoclassicism. The source for the ballet Pulcinella was the unpublished compositions of an Italian master from the 18^th century, G. B. Pergolesi, which Diaghilev found during his stays in Italy. He had them copied, and presented them to Stravinsky for editing and the subsequent creation of music for the ballet. These were compositions from the archives of the Naples Conservatory: Act 3 of Il fratello inamorat from 1732, and fragments from the opera Il Flaminio. He also added melodic material from Triol sonatas for the violin and continuo, as well as some well-known arias.

Stravinsky was later accused of not treating the great composer with enough reverence and respect. However, according to Stravinsky respect always remains infertile and can never be a productive and creative element. The theme of the ballet was, again, determined by Diaghilev, who found a manuscript of Neapolitan theatre comedies from 1700 when in Naples and chose from among them the comedy Four Identical Pulcinellas, which featured characters from Italian commedie dell´arte. Leonid Mjasin took charge of the ballet’s choreography, and Pablo Picasso was the stage designer. The premiere of the ballet took place at the Paris Opera in 1920 and Stravinsky was extremely pleased with the final form of the performance: “The performance of Pulcinella was one of those – certainly precious – theatre moments where everything is interconnected and the sum of all the parts – the theme, music, choreography and design, creates a continuous, homogeneous whole.” Pulcinella remains one of the most beautiful works of neoclassicism to this day.

Concertino, which Janáček (1854–1928) himself sometimes called a ‘small piano concerto’, is the middle of three chamber compositions produced at the composer´s creative zenith (Youth, Concertino and Capriccio). Janáček was inspired to compose Concertino in 1924 by an excellent performance by the outstanding Czech pianist Jan Heřman, to whom the author subsequently dedicated the work. It was originally supposed to be a suite called Spring. Shortly before finishing the composition, Janáček wrote to his friend Kamila Stösslová from Hukvaldy: “… I’ve composed a piano concerto named “Spring” here. There is a cricket, flies, a roe-deer – a swift creek – and a person…” The title ‘Spring – Suite’ was replaced by the simple ‘Concertino’ in the end. The first performance took place on 16.2.1926 in Brno at a concert of the Moravian Composers´ Club, and the composition was a great success – the whole of it even had to be repeated. Concertino was equally successful at its first performance in Prague in the same year, after which the composition immediately flew almost all around the world. It was performed at (among other places) the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Frankfurt in 1927.

At the request of the German specialized journal Pult und Taktstock, Janáček wrote a guide to the composition programme in 1927. In the first movement, a hedgehog is angry as the door to his den in an old linden tree was closed. The second movement is about a squirrel which used to jump around in the trees and but ended up dancing in a cage for the enjoyment of children. In the third movement, the staring eyes of owls and other critical denizens of the night are gazing at piano strings, and in the fourth movement it looks as if everyone is arguing over a coin – just like in a fairy tale.

Author: Jiří Zahrádka

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928): On an Overgrown Path, Sonata for violin and piano

Richard Strauss (1864–1949): Andante for Horn and Piano

Claude Debussy (1862–1918): Première Rhapsodie for clarinet

The Student Concert of the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno presents works by authors who had a significant influence on the future development of music at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century. The importance of Leoš Janáček’s musical legacy for culture in Brno is immeasurable. The Academy bears his name with pride, and so logically encourages its students to explore the composer’s works. Janáček originally intended the cycle On an Overgrown Path to be played on the harmonium. He started composing it in 1900, but gradually increased the amount of individual parts; the definitive version in two volumes wasn’t completed until 1911. Janáček’s Sonata for Violin and Piano was created just three years later, at the beginning of World War I.

German composer Richard Strauss and the Frenchman Claude Debussy rank among the most distinctive composers from the turn of the 20th century, though the compositional language they employ is relatively different. Whilst Claude Debussy speaks to us through impressionistic descriptive sound paintings, the work of Richard Strauss is often almost too expressive. The presented compositions are not the most typical products of their authors, however, as both of them were created under special circumstances: Strauss composed his Andante for French Horn and Piano to mark his father’s silver wedding anniversary, and Debussy created his Première Rhapsodie for the clarinet as a new piece to be played in the clarinet examinations at the Paris Conservatory.

Author: Monika Holá

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911): Piano Quartet in A minor

Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998): Piano Quartet

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928): Piano Trio, JW X/22, reconstruction by Miloš Štědroň

Josef Suk (1874–1935): Quartet in A minor, Op. 1 for Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello

The concert will present chamber works by leading musical figures of the turn of the 20^th century, and will also acquaint us with issues concerned with the reconstruction of pieces which have not been preserved until today, but have been written by other artists.

The Piano Quartet in A minor by Gustav Mahler is the only preserved chamber work from this great author of symphonic music. It is a composition he produced during his studies at the Vienna Conservatory, probably in 1876. The work has been preserved as a fragment, and it is not completely clear if the work, which only had three performances in the year of its creation, ever existed in another, more elaborate version. The first movement of the quartet wasn’t discovered until the 1960s by Mahler´s wife, Alma, and the composition had its modern premiere in 1964. In addition to the first complete movement of the Piano Quartet, several bars from the Scherzo were also preserved.

This fragment was later completed by Alfred Schnittke, one of the second half of the 20^th century’s most remarkable authors of music, after the piece caught his attention in 1988. Based on the preserved 24 bars, he created a very distinctive piece which is by no means a mere attempt to reconstruct the original but more of a “memory of what was not fulfilled.” In the end, we can understand this work as a unique palimpsest where the original Mahler layer slowly dissolves and is overlaid by a new layer which, however, comments on the original message and regains life within it again.

Janáček´s Piano Trio, composed in 1908, has not been preserved to this day. It had its premiere at Brno’s Club of Friends of Art in 1909, and its tale ends with a production in 1922. However, it is almost certain that the composition was destroyed by Janáček himself, who later transformed the material from the Trio into the form of a string quartet. The mystery of the missing piece, and some curiosity as to how it would sound with the chosen instruments, has led many authors inspired by L. N. Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” to reconstruct the piece on the basis of a reverse transformation from the Quartet. Each adaptation brings a different vision, a different perspective. At the concert we will hear a modification created by Miloš Štědroň.

The three-movement Piano Quartet by Josef Suk from 1891 is the composer´s first composition with an opus number. The fact that Suk had already composed many previous compositions is clear from the maturity of the work. The composer produced the piece during his studies at the Prague Conservatory in Antonín Dvořák´s class. He valued the quartet very much, as Dvořák had commented on the second movement: “What a great chap you are!” No wonder the young Josef Suk dedicated the composition to his beloved teacher.

Author: Jiří Zahrádka