BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo & Sang Yoon Kim

The young Korean clarinetist Sang Yoon Kim is returning to the festival exactly one year after he succeeded emerged as the clear victory at last year’s 67th annual Prague Spring International Music Competitions. A graduate of the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse in Paris, he will be demonstrating his exceptional qualities in Mozart’s lovely Concerto for Clarinet in A major KV 622, the slow second music of which (Adagio) is often called the most beautiful music ever written for that instrument. Accompanying him will be one of the most important British ensembles, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which will be making its first appearance in Prague under the baton of its current principal conductor Sakari Oramo, who is well known to the Prague public thanks to his first visit in 2007, when together with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, he performed a programme including Janáček’s Taras Bulba. 

Janáček will be on the programme again this year with the symphonic poem Ballad of Blaník (1919). The composer took inspiration for the work from a poem with the same title by Jaroslav Vrchlický that refers to the legend of the Knights of Blaník – a symbol of the hope and individuality of the Czech nation. Janáček dedicated the piece to President Masaryk. 

The concert will conclude with the famed Symphony No. 5 in C minor by Ludwig van Beethoven, about which the novelist and critic E. T. A. Hoffman wrote the following in 1810: “It reveals Beethoven’s Romanticism more than any of his other works, and it draws the listener inexorably into a beautiful spiritual kingdom that has no boundaries.” It is interesting that Beethoven somewhat unusually set the finale of this symphony in the “radiant” key of C major. In the minor key works the Beethoven had composed until that time, the finales had always remained in the minor. He broke this rule only three other times – besides in the Fifth, he did so in two piano sonatas and in his final, Ninth Symphony.