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For the PCO, May 2009 was one of the very busy months with many different events. The orchestra visited Germany twice, played in Mikołów, Poland and in Ostrava within the Janáček May (Janáčkův Máj) International Music Festival, participated in the Prague Spring competition as an accompanying orchestra and still managed to record Benda’s violin concertos.
We especially treasure the concert cooperation with the distinguished violinist David Garrett, who despite his age has become a great musical star and is very popular in Germany. Garrett’s style, fashionably original but wholly perfect both musically and technically, has only confirmed his singularity and along with the PCO totally sold out the concert halls four times in Braunschweig, Viersen, Mannheim and Aachen. For the orchestra, also the repeated cooperation with the excellent Czech violinist Roman Patočka, with whom we recorded two violin concertos by František Benda for Czech Radio, was very important and interesting.
The end of 2008 turned out to be very rewarding for the Prague Chamber Orchestra. After a longer break caused by some financial problems of the organising agency, the orchestra established new cooperation with the most prestigious music agency in Japan, Kajimoto Concert Management, which resulted in a very successful tour of Japan – already our ninth. In terms of its importance, it was one of the best evaluated tours of the Land of the Rising Sun, in which also the fact that Japanese soloists of great fame and renown – the sopranos Hiroko Koda and Tomotaka Okamoto – performed with the orchestra had its share. In particular Okamoto’s vocal ‘gift’ makes it possible for him to sing exacting coloratura soprano arias, as the only one in Japan. This ability along with his extravagant and spectacular appearance make Okamota the number one star. At the organiser’s request, the orchestra concluded the tour with two concerts with a purely Christmas repertoire in Tokio, embellished by a young Czech rising star, the soprano Lucie Mlynářová. Japan Tour 2008 revealed a new dimension in the cooperation and thus set very high standards for further expected negotiations.
[ Cooperation with Mr. Tomotaka Okamoto on the Japan tour. ]
The last season was devoted to French festivals. The Prague Chamber Orchestra performed at the Les Flaneries Musicales in Rheims both in 2006 and this year. In that Mozartean season, we filled four evenings with Mozart’s lovely music, whereas this year we captivated our audience with Beethoven and Mendelssohn. It is a part of the festival’s concerts that the concerts are recorded on CD.
The most important event of Autumn 2006 was the trip to the USA, which, despite being the shortest of all the sixteen tours to this country undertaken so far, was immensely important and interesting for the orchestra. The PCO, for example, performed for the first time at the home of the elite American Military Academy at West Point. It is almost incredible that the orchestra was welcomed there by a huge concert hall for a 3,600-member audience. One event of historic importance for the PCO took place within the tour – we performed a concert on the occasion of the opening of the Bohemian National Hall in New York on 28th October in the presence of our former president Mr Václav Havel and with the extraordinary interest of the media, but for the very first time under a different name – Prague Sinfonia, which is a new project of the PCO for symphonic musicians.
For its first trip of 2007, the PCO headed to the Western part of France, to Nantes, where the annual mammoth music festival La Folle Journée 2007 took place. With a little exaggeration, this festival could be labelled the trade fair of music, because in the course of ten days, 270 concerts were performed here, which took place all day from morning to night, in eight halls under one roof. Up to 4,250 listeners can fit into all the halls at one time. The festival was founded by René Martin in 1995. In the very first year, 180 artists participated in the festival and 35 concerts were heard by 25,000 listeners. Already after eleven years, in 2006, 1,800 artists already performed 250 concerts here and the whole pageant was seen by 112,000 listeners! It is truly almost incredible how the organisers succeed in managing such a gigantic event. Our orchestra presented four successful concerts here, which fittingly expressed the beauty and stylishness of Czech and Eastern European music.
Along with further concerts in Prague and abroad, we recorded two interesting CDs in the past season: one for the prestigious label Orfeo with the music of Michael Haydn and the second for Czech Radio with the Piano Concertos by F. X. Dušek jointly performed with the terrific Karel Košárek as soloist.
The last season of our subscription concerts in the Dvořák Hall of the Rudolfinum was, in terms of soloists and dramaturgy, very diverse. As the most significant dramaturgic event, we can consider the world premiere of the Symphony for Small orchestra by Jiří Gemrot. The composition was created at the request of the Prague Chamber Orchestra and was dedicated to the orchestra by the composer. With hyperbole, we can say that we celebrated Gemrot’s significant anniversary together in this way.
[ Cooperation with Mr. Menahem Pressler on the US tour. ]
The festival summer of 2006 thoroughly tested the limits of the Prague Chamber Orchestra. The orchestra was literally travelling from one place to another all over Europe, and the demands of the festivals on the repertoire made this period a very challenging conclusion of the year’s concert season both artistically and in terms of interpretation. This proved the exceptional quality of the orchestra, which even in these tough operating conditions succeeded in maintaining our quality standards very high.
The summer festival marathon already began for the Prague Chamber Orchestra in June, namely on the domestic scene by the most important festival Prague Spring, where the world premiere of the composition Sinfonia numerica by the composer Ivana Loudová was performed. Already still in June, the orchestra opened the festival Smetana’s Litomysl and performed a concert in Klostenkirche Fürstenzell as part of the Europäische Wochen Passau, where we played with the excellent trumpeter Gábor Boldoczki. In the summer, the festival programme became considerably busier. The Prague Chamber Orchestra performed again with Boldoczki at the Rheingau Musik Festival in Kloster Eberbach and two days later at the festival Internationale Herrenchiemsee Festspiele under the baton of the gracious baroness Ljubka zu Guttenberg. Here, like in 2004, the orchestra was forced to double our numbers to form a small symphonic orchestra. Immediately afterwards, the qualities of the orchestra were tested by the festival with the long name Les Flaneries Musicales d’Été de Reims. At four concerts, we played all Mozart’s overtures, several symphonies and concertos for solo instruments. Almost all the compositions were being recorded live on CD for the record label Transart, and a major television documentary on the whole event was being filmed here by the important French television company Mezzo. And to make it even more difficult, the whole stay in Reims was complicated by high temperatures, which were reflected even in the concert hall by temperatures significantly above 30° C.
The Prague Chamber Orchestra began the second half of the summer with concerts at Catalan festivals in Spain – Torroella de Montgrí and El Vendrell, where one of the most important cellists of the 20th century Pau Casals had worked before. In Villach, Austria at the festival Carinthischer Sommer, the orchestra was rejoined by the legendary pianist Paul Badura-Skoda, who despite his advanced age displayed extraordinary qualities and physical endurance – in two evenings, he performed four Piano Concertos by Mozart. Nevertheless, the Prague Chamber Orchestra was in no way inferior and framed his performance with a precise rendition of the challenging compositions by Bohuslav Martinu, Felix Mendelssohn and Manuel de Falla. The Carinthian performances were followed by a very interesting participation of the orchestra at a festival in Krakow, Poland. That was a breakthrough for further cooperation, because the Prague Chamber Orchestra visited Poland for the first time since 1989. A symbolical full stop to this year’s festival frenzy was a concert in the exquisite Haydn Hall of the Esterházy Castle in Austrian Eisenstadt. Here too the orchestra performed with Gábor Boldoczki as a soloist.
[ Gábor Boldoczki and the Prague Chamber Orchestra at a rehearsal in Haydn Hall, Eisenstadt, Austria on 10th September 2006 ]
At the beginning of 2006, the Prague Chamber Orchestra performed together with the Austrian band Mozartband in German Bad Kissingen. An interesting and innovative music project was created mainly through a unique fusion of a soul band and a classic chamber orchestra, which remarkably captured the local demanding audience already during this first performance. The next concert in January was marked by a knowledgeable Mozartean interpretation and ranked among the most important events at the beginning of this year. It was held in the church of Sts. Simon and Juda in Prague with the whole programme being recorded by Czech Radio. To celebrate the 250th anniversary of W. A. Mozart’s birth, the recording of this concert was then broadcast within the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) a week later. It may be said with a bit of hyperbole that there is hardly any other music audible on all the stages of the world this year, marked by the celebration of Mozart’s jubilee, than that of precisely Mozart. It was not any different in Wiesbaden and Frankfurt, where within the celebrations of the ingenious composer, compositions were performed under the baton of the conductor Gerd Albrecht which had been recorded by the orchestra last year as a part of a book for children called “Do you Know Mozart?”. The Prague Chamber Orchestra especially appreciated the concerts in Frankfurt, because we were able to sell out the famous Alte Oper two days in a row, which with its seating capacity of 2,300 ranks among truly prestigious concert halls.
