September 30, 2009
Look Forward to 2010!
The 65th Annual Prague Spring International Music Festival will continue the celebrations of the life and works of Bohuslav Martinů and, at the same time, will pay homage to Gustav Mahler, marking the 150th anniversary of his birth.
The prologue to the Festival will be on Sunday, May 9, provided by the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir from London, under the baton of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, in a performance of J. S. Bach’s Mass in B minor. The opening concerts with Smetana’s My Country have been entrusted to the Prague Philharmonia under its new chief conductor, Jakub Hrůša. For the first time, the 81-year-old maestro André Previn will stand on the conductor’s podium of the Czech Philharmonic, but, before that, he will appear as the soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E-flat and will also perform with the American clarinettist Thomas Martin in the world premiere of his own clarinet sonata.
Amongst the artists appearing at the Prague Spring are, for the first time, the world-renowned mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina and the 74-year-old ‘King of Klezmer’, the Argentine-born Giora Feidman (who performed some of the music on the soundtrack to the Oscar-winning Schindler’s List). With the Slovak State Philharmonic, Košice, he will perform Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and also give the Czech premiere of the Concerto for Giora, which was composed for him by the Slovak-born composer-conductor, currently living in the United States, Peter Breiner.
The tried-and-true team of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields from London and the American pianist Murray Perahia will be returning to the Prague Spring Festival stage. And the pianist Emanuel Ax, together with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, will perform Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2. We can also again look forward to the ‘Queen of the Violin’, Anne-Sophie Mutter, this time in a performance of Brahms’s Violin Concerto.
After a five-year pause the beautiful Indian sitar virtuoso, Anoushka Shankar, will be returning to the Festival. Another exceptional event will be the return to Prague of the 85-year-old conductor Pierre Boulez with his renowned Ensemble intercontemporain from Paris.
A detailed programme will be posted on the Web later in October. Look forward to the Spring!