Thu, 10. 12. 2020, 7.00 p.m.

B2 HANZELKA 100

Venue: Zlín Congress Centre  |  Organizer: Filharmonie Bohuslava Martinů, o.p.s.  | 

Amid the flurry of musical and other commemorative public events that our orchestra in Zlín is marking in the 2020–21 season, one anniversary that has not been forgotten is the birth centenary of Jiří Hanzelka, someone to whom music, and especially organ music, was very important at all stages of his life. Hanzelka was a keen organist, and even had a concert organ installed in his home in the Nivy area of Zlín. He was also a prime mover in having an organ installed at the Dům úmění arts centre as it was at the time, although this move was fraught with complications, because in the 1950s the organ was seen as an undesirable propagator of religious sentiment, which was fundamentally at odds with with the ideology of Socialist Realism and its cultural policy. Unsurprisingly therefore, the communists at first categorically refused to allow the organ, but Jiří Hanzelka actively threw his weight behind the cause and finally managed to persuade the minister of culture to overturn the original refusal.

Johann Sebastian Bach was considered the notional king of organ music for centuries, and it is an orchestral arrangement of his well-known Toccata and Fugue in D-minor that opens tonight's programme.

While Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the most brilliant composers of all time, never wrote a concerto for the organ, his work bristles with illustrious examples of music for another keyboard instrument, the piano, and tonight's occasion features his dazzling Piano Concert no. 5, the "Emperor", which was last heard here in Zlín more than 15 years ago. Tonight's soloist, who also comes from Zlín, is the acclaimed Czech pianist Karel Košárek.

In the second half of the concert we will hear works inspired by tunes and rhythms from other countries: Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnol, and Borodin's Polovtsian Dances, which will remind us of Hanzelka's legendary travelling expeditions which brought him and Miroslav Zikmund fame throughout Czechoslovakia as it was at the time, giving birth to the phenomenon that was H+Z.