27. 9. 2021

ŠPAČKOVÁ | KRUŽÍK

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Our opening Subscription Series B concert welcomes back the outstanding Czech bassoonist Michaela Špačková, laureate of many prestigious international festival prizes, whose last appearance in Zlín was in the Talentinum festival in 2014.

Tonight's programme, under the baton of the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic's Chief Conductor Robert Kružík, presents works from the cusp of the Classical/Romantic period and from major composers of the latter half of the 19th Century. Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Haydn were composed after he met Ferdinand Pohl, the librarian of the Vienna Philharmonic Society, who was working at the time on a biography of Joseph Haydn. Pohl showed Brahms part of his transcription of Haydn's Divertimento in B major, whose second movement contains the theme known as the St. Anthony Chorale. The authorship of this piece has been widely debated, with several theoreticians tending to attribute the Chorale to Haydn's pupil Ignaz Pleyel, but this did not prevent Brahms from borrowing the original theme to use for his own symphonic variations resulting in a set of eight variations developing a piece composed in the form of a Baroque passacaglia and a powerful finale.

The Bassoon Concerto in F-major by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, a native of Pressburg (now Bratislava), was virtually unknown until the mid-1950s when it was given prominence by the distinguished American musician and educator Himie Voxman, who discovered the work in a catalogue of manuscripts in the British Museum in London. Since then the piece, written around 1805, has been performed with growing frequency and is now a standard part of the bassoon repertoire around the world. As Hummel's only bassoon concerto, it bears all the hallmarks of the late Classical period and excels by its striking melodies and the virtuoso passages.

Our concert closes with Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, a work imbued with the idea of insuperable and inevitable fate. The symphony was composed from 1877-1878, and despite the harsh criticism levelled at the work and Tchaikovsky himself soon after its premiere, it gradually found great favour with the public. Even today it is one of the most frequently heard late 19th-century symphonies and many consider it to be Tchaikovsky's best composition for orchestra.