18. 1. 2022 • Anna Picard
“No music on earth can compare to ours” sings the child in the last movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Compared to the vast worlds of sound, emotion, philosophy and poetry in Mahler’s Second and Third Symphonies, this is a delicate and concise work with which to introduce a wider audience to Semyon Bychkov’s Mahler Cycle with the Czech Philharmonic. Composed in the last year of the nineteenth century and the first year of the twentieth, it is more gentle than the First Symphony, more innocent than the Fifth, and devoid of the existential terror that creeps into the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies.
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21. 1. 2021 • Michaela Vostřelová
Semyon Bychkov is half way through his five-year term as the Artistic Director of the Czech Philharmonic. He says that he has never experienced such hard times with any of his previous orchestras. Besides cancelled concerts, postponed recording plans and cautious outlook for the future, there are still composers who write new music for the Czech Philharmonic. And this was the main focus of our interview.
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10. 1. 2020 • Boris Klepal
Since the fantastic success of his opera South Pole in Munich, Miroslav Srnka has undoubtedly become the most familiar face of the Czech contemporary music scene. Our interview, however, deals not so much with media fame as with the consequences it has had for the rest of his life. This is related to Srnka’s collaboration with the Czech Philharmonic, his shift from the privacy of composing into public life, and how the specifics of his situation influence solutions to compositional problems and creative questions in general.
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8. 12. 2014 •
It has been several decades now since Bohuslav Martinů’s opera What Men Live By was last performed in composer’s home country. In December 2014, the Czech Philharmonic will perform the piece in its Czech concert premiere under the baton of Jiří Bělohlávek.
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