2011 Selections

Like traditionally, heard at the opening concert of the 64th annual festival will be the performance of Smetana’s Má vlast, this time played by the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra under the leadership of the Polish conductor Antoni Wit.

Change to the conductor of the opening concerts on 12 and 13 May 2009

The Prague Spring festival office hereby announces that because of the serious illness of the Estonian conductor Neeme Järvi, taking over as conductor of the traditional opening concerts on Tuesday and Wednesday, 12 and 13 May 2009 at which Bedřich Smetana’s cycle of symphonic poems Má vlast is to be heard will be the current chief conductor and music director of the Warsaw Philharmonic, Antoni Wit.

The fifty-five-year-old Krakow native was a pupil of the famed Polish conductor Henryk Czyz. He studied composition at the Krakow Academy of Music with Krzysztof Penderecki and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. At age seventeen he took second prize at the prestigious Herbert von Karajan International Conducting Competition in former West Berlin, and soon thereafter he conducted the Prague Symphony Orchestra at Prague Spring. For many years he has also worked as the chief conductor of the Polish National Radio and Television Orchestra in Katovice, with which he has made numerous noteworthy recordings for the Naxos label, including a recording of Má vlast that has earned critical acclaim. He introduced himself in the Czech Republic as the music director of the Warsaw Philharmonic in 2005 at the Moravian Autumn International Music Festival.

Antoni Wit frequently guest conducts the world’s top orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic and the London BBC Symphony Orchestra. Besides his concert and recording activities, he is a professor at Fryderyk Chopin University in Warsaw.

The tickets to both concerts remain valid.