Smetana. Novák. Husa. Dvořák

The Prague Philharmonia opens the 2024/2025 season in the final phase of the Year of Czech Music. Who would be more suitable for the opening ceremony than Bedřich Smetana? From the works of this great composer we have selected the overture to his masterpiece – The Secret. In this opera, Smetana draws from Shakespeare and transforms the theme of forbidden love into a comedy.

Another composition having its precursor in literature is the symphonic poem The Golden Spinning Wheel, through which Antonín Dvořák paid tribute to the greatest Czech Romantic poet, Karel Jaromír Erben. The Golden Spinning Wheel belongs to four symphonic poems that Dvořák wrote towards the end of his life in Vysoká u Příbrami and is justly considered one of the jewels of Czech music

In addition to Smetana and Dvořák, Vítězslav Novák will also be heard at the start of the season. His Slovak Suite takes us to Moravia and reveals the composer’s fascination with folk melodies and the continuity of his style with that of his teacher, Antonín Dvořák.

The opening program also features Karel Husa, Pulitzer Prize winner and prominent composer in the United States, where he emigrated in the 1950s after his studies in Paris. His works were therefore not performed in Czechoslovakia during the totalitarian regime. Our orchestra, however, has continuously devoted itself to them and, for example, in 2018 performed his legendary Music for Prague 1968 in Orchestral Series A.

Tonight we will hear Serenade for Wind Quintet, Strings, Xylophone and Harp, in which the solo parts will be played by the popular, award-winning Belfiato Quintet, whose players grew up artistically at our Orchestral Academy, later became members of the Prague Philharmonia, and still regularly collaborate with our orchestra.