Bedřich Smetana’s Má vlast (My Fatherland) occupies a very special place in the heart of Czechs. The patriotic cycle of symphonic poems depicts Vyšehrad (Prague’s castle), the flowing River Vltava and Bohemia’s countryside, along with stirring episodes from Czech legend.
Every year, the Prague Spring International Music Festival is launched in Smetana Hall with a performance of Má vlast and on 12th May 2016 (Smetana’s death) the 71st Festival begins exactly the same way. Different orchestras have had the honour of giving this opening concert over the years, but this time round it will be performed by the orchestra most associated with the work, the Czech Philharmonic.
The festival was the inspiration of the great Rafael Kubelík – Chief Conductor of the Czech Philharmonic – and was first held in 1946 (the same year Leonard Bernstein made his overseas debut with the Czech Philharmonic) when the orchestra celebrated its 50th anniversary. Seventy years on, conducting honours fall to Paavo Järvi, who consistently garners positive reviews on Bachtrack, praised for his relationship with the Orchestre de Paris, where “twinkling eye contact and beaming smiles illustrated a collective relish for music making”. The opening concert should be one of the hottest festival tickets, so it’s good to know that Má vlast is repeated the very next evening.
Here is Kubelík, returning to Prague after the fall of the Iron Curtain, conducting Vltava at the 1990 Festival.
Although there is little Dvořák in 2016, the music of a lesser celebrated Czech, Bohuslav Martinů, is strongly represented. His perky Sinfonietta “La Jolla”, an orchestral work which features a solo pianist, is on the bill for PKF Prague Philharmonia’s conductor Jiri Rosen's festival debut. Their concert also features Miloslav Kabeláč's Fifth Symphony. Kabeláč, whose work was silenced after the 1968 Soviet invasion, is rarely performed, so a couple of Czech rarities worth exploring here.
Martinů’s surrealist opera Julietta, subtitled The Key to Dreams, has seen a rise in fortunes in recent years, with prominent productions in London, Zurich and Frankfurt. The bizarre plot involves a travelling bookseller, seeking a woman whose voice he once heard, who stumbles into a seaside town where none of the residents can remember their past. Prague’s National Theatre, which staged the opera’s 1938 première, presents a production by Zuzana Gilhuus.
Another Czech Phil concert celebrates the music of their Hungarian neighbours. Juraj Valčuha conducts a programme which includes Bartók’s colourful Concerto for Orchestra and Kodály’s Háry János Suite, which begins with a huge orchestral sneeze (signal – to Hungarians – that the following story is “absolutely true”!).