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

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