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Czech Television presents:
That was Prague Spring 2011
We set ourselves two main goals during the preparation of this year's Prague Spring.
The first was to commemorate the 200th Anniversary of the Prague Conservatoire.
ROMAN BĚLOR, DIRECTOR OF THE PRAGUE SPRING
And the second task was to commemorate the legacy of Gustav Mahler, whom we commemorated already last year.
The fact that we entrusted the important opening concert of the Prague Spring
to the Prague Conservatoire Symphony orchestra was accompanied by a number of logistic tasks.
One of these non-standard procedures was for instance the rehearsal workshop in Polička.
I think we have coped with it quite well - thanks to the understanding of the management of the Prague Conservatoire.
And also thanks to the co-operation of the town Polička and especially thanks to the concentrated efforts of Maestro Jiří Bělohlávek.
I have encountered musicians here with great technical skills, they are prepared,
they are young and full of energy and they are very attentive.
I would even compare this situation to a schoolbook ideal model,
where my strict and professional exigencies unite with their youthful enthusiasm.
And all the rehearsals are taking place in a beautiful and relaxed atmosphere,
full of great aspiration but at the same time full of friendly spirit.
We are, of course, happy about all our successful concerts,
because all the concerts are in a way "our children".
But, of course, we were especially delighted about our opening concert
because to see the enthusiastic members of the Prague Conservatoire Symphony orchestra "eating out of Maestro Bělohlávek's hand"
was something that must have moved even the most confirmed cynics.
So that was an immense pleasure and I am glad we have contributed to the celebration of the anniversary of the Prague Conservatoire in such a dignified manner.
The concert was a great success, I should say 2 concerts, since the opening concert was repeated on May, 13th.
The Prague Spring as the festival that takes place in the spring should make a young and fresh impression.
We try to achieve that in a number of ways,
one of which is the tradition of the competition we have been organizing for young musicians.
Another tradition are the Morning concerts, which provide an opportunity for young artists at the beginning of their career.
Whether we have been successful and the festival really makes a young and fresh impression must be assessed by our public,
but I firmly believe we have been successful and have achieved this goal this year, which was the 66th year of the Prague Spring.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the second round of the trombone competition.
A lot of young laureates have been returning to Prague
and we have suddenly realized they have become famous personalities,
who include in their CVs that they entered the world's art scene in Prague.
And I believe the same will happen this year again.
That we will encounter strong personalities and once again we will hear the pleasing statement:
"We started in Prague in 2011."
It is always a great honour to play in this wonderful hall.
And at this great historic festival.
By the way, I love playing viola, although my favourite instrument is the cello.
That is why I play viola, to get nearer to the cello.
Always when I prepare my recital with my great friend, the pianist Itamar Golan
we put both violin and viola sonatas on the repertoire.
The highlight of this evening will be the second half,
where we will play one of the most important pieces of the second half of the 20th century.
A piece by a very good friend of mine, the living legend, Krzysztof Penderecki.
I hope the Czech public will fall in love with it just as I did when I heard it for the first time.
Martin Rost and Pavel Černý, 4-hand organ
Drahomíra Matznerová, organ
We had a special group of concerts in the cycle Prague Organ Days.
Antonín Matzner, Prague Spring Programmer
Altogether 5 concerts took place in various Prague temples as well as in the Dvořák Hall of Rudolfinum.
Each of them presented a different type of music, from the music of the Renaissance and Early Baroque to contemporary music.
We heard a specimen of the organ repertoire of the 19th century as well as the music of Romanticism,
and at the concert of Aleš Bárta in the Dvořák Hall, the Concerto for Organ and Orchestra of Karel Husa had its Czech premiere.
Karel Husa is a Czech composer, who has been living for many years in exile and who is celebrating his 90th birthday this year.
Speaking of organ concerts, I have to mention another concert which was not part of the cycle.
It was a jazz concert of Ondřej Pivec Organic Quartet in the hall of the Mercedes Forum.
Ondřej Pivec plays electric Hammond organ, he is Czech but he has been living for years in New York,
where he regularly plays in a Harlem African-American Baptist Church, which is quite remarkable,
that a European white man plays organ during African-American church services.
And it became obvious from the response of the public that he certainly has gained something from the source power of jazz music.
The co-operation with the National Theater has an immense tradition,
which can be traced to the very beginnings of the festival.
The National Theater has been offering its premieres and repeats of its opera and dance performances to the Prague Spring on a regular basis,
and this year, we tried out a larger form of co-operation:
a real co-production of the micro-opera of the distinguished German composer Heiner Goebbels:
"I Went To The House But Did Not Enter", perfomed by the amazing British vocal Hilliard Ensemble.
The 66th Prague Spring Festival opens a very wide spectrum of possibilities of co-operation with the National Theater,
which I can say we managed to embrace very well.
The concept of Roman Bělor, who enriches the festival with other genres,
musical theater or other perfoming arts genres connected with music
is very convenient for us and we can comply with this co-operation very well.
I am very happy we can present our new productions to the Prague Spring audience
which are Mozart's The Abduction from Seraglio, Wagner's Parsifal or Katya Kabanova,
which is our last season's production directed by Robert Wilson.
But also our ballet production Cinderella choreographed by Jean-Christophe Maillot from Monte Carlo
which I consider an excellent example of modern contemporary ballet.
And even in the domain of a more alternative music we have the project of Heiner Goebbels,
which is a co-production of the Prague Spring and the National Theater.
The whole project has several layers,
Some say it is about death, which is not my view,
others say it is about failure, which is probably more true,
because all the texts have their origin in the experimental literature of the 20th century.
You will not find a story in them, it is not poetry nor prose, it is something else.
Something between music and literature.
The preparation of the whole project took about two years.
It started with getting to know one another, meeting one another, experimenting with texts and voices,
with sounds, with the staging, and that was the most important thing.
Until this performance, Hilliard Ensemble had sung together almost entirely in churches, never on a theatre stage.
They are entering the stage for the first time with this piece
and they are doing it with an immense delight, with an appetite to do it, with motivation and pleasure,
and that is something we can build on.
I think the result has widely surpassed all expectations we had when we started the project.
Heiner Goebbels prepared a unique work for us.
You have to consider the fact that our quartet has never performed on a theatre stage before.
It was a completely new experience for us.
It is very admirable that he had made himself familiar with our work in detail before,
and adjusted his project to our vocal qualities.
And at the same time he pushed us towards new things. So we ended up on a stage.
We nevertheless remain a vocal quartet, even on the stage.
In addition to that, we had to learn to speak like dramatic actors, because Goebbels conceived the piece like this.
We have never experienced anything like this, it was wonderful,
we are glad we did something completely new and we hope it shifted us further
and that the audience enjoyed it as much as we did.
For me, the Prague Spring has been part of my musical curriculum vitae from the time of my studies until today.
I have been involved in the Prague Spring competition in the last years,
so I have a marvelous, close and personal relationship with the festival.
We prepared the concert of Dawn Upshaw,
we spent a lot of time with the promotion of it, there is even her picture on our weekly posters.
So the posters are out-of-date now, anyway, five days before the concert she announced that she had to cancel for family reasons.
First we discussed the possibility of alternation but then we decided to cancel it
and we hope the concert will successfully take place next year or the year after.
We are refunding the money for the concert on the spot,
which seems to be the most convenient way for everyone.
Last year I was so lucky that I became the laureate of the Prague Spring competition.
I took the second place and from the point of view of my career it was an immense leap.
Of course, I had participated in many other competitions before,
but the Prague Spring, including its competition, is so prestigious and world-known
that since that time the number of concerts has been rising permanently and I am very happy for having had such an opportunity.
My relationship with the Prague Spring is a very positive one, because I was born in Prague, I live here and it is my favourite town.
And I find the festival very attractive not only because it is so closely tied with my native and favourite town,
but also because it is so world-famous and interesting from the point of view of its programme,
so I am very glad I had the opportunity to play there.
DAGMAR PECKOVÁ, A TRIBUTE TO ATONALITY AND ABSTRACTION I.
An exceptionally interesting project of the Prague Spring, which resulted from the initiative of the Kampa Museum,
was the project A tribute to atonality and abstraction, which took place at the Kampa island.
It is striking that this project was a result of the co-operation of an important Prague gallery and the Prague Spring festival.
It was conceived with the aim to reveal to our audience the narrow links between the world of music and the world of fine art.
It was very interesting for us to try out a co-operation with such a significant fine art institution
and I am convinced that it must have been very interesting for the Prague audience to witness something like a "Gesamtkunstwerk",
that is an interconnection of diverse worlds of art, which is very consistent and inspiring.
A TRIBUTE TO ATONALITY II, SIEGFRIED MAUSER, PIANO, ANNA MARIA PAMMER, SOPRANO
We returned to the second decade of the 20th century in the Kampa Museum
and we offered an interesting exhibition to the lovers of music and of the fine art.
It was an exhibition of 3 great figures of world's art, František Kupka and Wassily Kandinsky in fine arts and Arnold Schoenberg in Music.
For me this exhibition is even more significant, because I had the honour to meet the son of Arnold Schoenberg, Larry.
And we were able to discuss in detail the difficult transition from tonal to atonal music.
And equally interesting was the meeting with Dr. Christian Meyer, the director of the Schoenberg centre in Vienna,
who prepared this exhibition and provided a clear explanation how the transition took place.
The songs of Arnold Schoenberg Op. 2 and Op. 6 fall into his late romantic period.
They are very demanding, especially the piano part that is very robust and often sounds like a whole symphonic orchestra.
As a singer I have to adapt to this sound.
From the point of view of the musical style, these are traditional songs,
you will not find anything from Schoenberg's late atonality or his twelve-tone technique method in them.
He wrote them entirely in the spirit of Late Romanticism.
I am going to play Ferenc Liszt's Piano concerto n.1 in E-flat major tonight at the Prague Spring.
It is in a way a fateful piece for me, because I played it 7 years ago in the finals of the Prague Spring competition and I won.
That is why this concert is a sort of comeback for me, it is also a great honour and I am very much looking forward to it.
There are several hundreds of demands I hear every day from my fans in the style of "Can we take a picture of you?"
And they add: "That is the prize you pay."
And I answer: "Do you really think so? Well, if I had all that wasted time back,
those thousands of hours, I would definitely use it in a more meaningful way, but such is life."
And you cannot do anything about it, unless you decide to become annoying and vexatious, which is not what I want.
VIENNA ACADEMY ORCHESTRA, JOHN MALKOVICH - NARRATOR
If you ask me why was I interested in Jack Unterweger, it was because I was offered to create a play for John Malkovich.
The subject matter was already given, I had not thought about it before, but I would write a play for John Malkovich on any subject.
That means even about Jack Unterweger.
If you want to know, what do I find interesting on Jack Unterweger today, after I have researched a lot about him,
I would say it is a very interesting character that reveals a lot about his own and our present.
About anticipated patterns of behaviour, about people that think they can see through other people
and about the phenomenon of a man who thinks he has power over life and death.
The character of Jack Unterweger is very well written, Michael did a very good job.
I also enjoy the work with Martin Haselbeck and his musicians very much, they are fantastic.
They always find refined ways how to co-create the performance through music.
It is very impressive and that is what I like.
I heard Mahler's music for the first time when I was 13 years old,
and it was a shock for me, because this music expressed the feelings of my life.
Since then, I have been studying the rest of Mahler's music.
It is an important part of my life, I would not be me without Mahler's music.
I have learnt a lot from it and I am especially happy to play it here at the Prague Spring,
since in each Mahler's work there are musical motives and strains of Czech music,
beautiful and expressive sound, full of happiness on the one hand and full of sadness on the other.
And all this has its origins in places where we are playing at the moment
and that makes me happy.
I have been fond of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra for years now.
I often play Mahler with them, we played the 3rd, the 2nd and now the 8th symphony.
It is an orchestra of real musicians, which means they experience music with their bodies and souls.
I really enjoy working with them, it is no doubt a world-class orchestra.
Concerning Gustav Mahler as a native of Bohemia and his legacy,
I think we have succeeded in perfoming his important works,
needless to mention the organizational complexity of the staging of his Symphony No. 8.
But we succeeded in getting the San Francisco Symphony to play his Symphony No. 2 with Michael Tilson Thomas.
And the festival was closed in an ingenious manner with the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle,
who played Mahler's Symphony No. 6.
Mahler has followed me through my whole life since my childhood.
It was Mahler and his music that made me become a conductor.
Besides, this moment is absolutely extraordinary for me,
because I am in this country, where I feel so much the presence of Mahler.
This whole area of Europe, that is his world.
So today's concert is something like a return home for me.
We are already old friends with the Berlin Philharmonic and we love to play music.
You can see that even in the rehearsals, the people simply love to play.
That is another reason why I consider myself a happy man.