Six years after their last Carnegie Hall appearance, Music Director Semyon Bychkov and his Czech Philharmonic returned for the orchestra’s first concert in a three-day residency winding up the 2024 Year of Czech Music, an international celebration spotlighting Czech composers that takes place every decade. This year’s observation of the tradition is particularly noteworthy since its marks both the 100th anniversary of the founding of the celebration and the bicentennial of the birth of Bedřich Smetana, the Bohemian composer widely regarded as “the father of Czech music”.
Yo-Yo Ma was the spellbinding soloist in the concert opener, Antonin Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor, a work written during the composer’s three-year stay in America and replete with longing for his Bohemian homeland. Ma has recorded the piece multiple times, most notably for Sony in 1995 with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur. On this occasion he delivered an inspired performance – full of passion, dedication and refinement, well-matched by Bychkov and the orchestra’s sensitive, powerfully rendered accompaniment. The cellist’s playing was warm and ardent throughout, with a wide range of dynamic, sometimes producing a mere thread of tone, most remarkably in the sublime Adagio, at other times soaring above the large ensemble. In response to the audience’s enthusiastic ovation, the cellist offered an encore: an emotionally charged medley of the Afro-American spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen and the hymn-like Goin’ Home (after the Largo from Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony) arranged for solo cello by William Arms Fisher.
Bychkov and the Czech players were at their most committed and vibrant in three selections from Má vlast (My Fatherland), Smetana’s six-part patriotic cycle of symphonic poems relating the history, landscape and legends of Czechoslovakia, a piece the orchestra has recorded more than twenty times. This performance showed Bychkov reveling in the ensemble’s rich and resonant sound while vaunting the virtuosity of the soloists, especially in the gorgeous harp arpeggios representing medieval songs of remembrance in the opening of Vyšehrad (The High Castle), the part depicting the seat of the earliest Czech monarchs.
Vitava (The Moldau), the familiar stand-alone movement, vividly conveyed the ebb and flow of the river’s occasionally turbulent journey from a far-away forest to the capital Prague and beyond. The dark narrative of Šárka, the legendary female warrior who ruthlessly led her man-hating troupe in the 8th-century massacre known as The Maidens’ War, erupted with extraordinarily voluptuous sound, its texture becoming increasingly complex as it moved toward an astoundingly graphic climax. The audience’s appreciation was rewarded with two encores, both by Dvořák: a lilting account of Slavonic Dance no.2 in E minor, Op.72, followed by a joyful and enthusiastic version of the Slavonic Dance no.1 in C major, Op.46.
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