Sun, 24. 4. 2022, 7.00 p.m.

A4 MRÁČEK | GOLDMARK

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

Jan Mráček, Robert Kružík and the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic join forces in tonight's 4th Subscription Series A concert which delves into the musical influences of the American continent when the 20th century, in particular, proved highly inspirational for whole generations of European composers.

George Gershwin's Cuban Overture, which opens the concert, would probably never have been written had the composer not spent a fortnight in Havana in 1932. Those "two hysterical weeks ... where no sleep was had", as he commented later, drove him to compose this impressionistic piece originally called Rumba, which introduced the typical Cuban melodies, rhythms and even some of the local traditional percussion instruments of the time to an unsuspecting America. Its premiere at the former Adolph Lewisohn Stadium in New York is documented to have been attended by precisely 17,845 paying spectators!

A rather more modest audience, however, was present for the premiere of the violin concerto by the often somewhat overlooked Hungarian-born composer Karl Goldmark whose Opus 28, a strongly Romantic piece, is his only surviving violin concerto. The work illustrates the composer's predilection for the harmonic expression of Richard Wagner and his admiration of Mendelssohn and Dvořák. It is performed tonight by Jan Mráček, whose credentials include Concertmaster with the Czech Philharmonic, and winner of Vienna's prestigious Fritz Kreisler Violin Competition.

It was also to the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra that Bohuslav Martinů dedicated his fifth symphony in 1946. The work was written while Martinů was exiled in America amid the end-of-war celebrations when the composer began to think about returning to his liberated homeland. The symphony's general spirit is not, however, one of untrammelled optimism given its doleful undertones invoked by the composer's borrowing of Bolavá Hlavěnka ('My Aching Head'), a Moravian folk madrigal. "It is a well constructed work, organic and well ordered," Martinů said. "There is very little in it that I find wanting".