Nedbal – Martinů – Tchaikovsky

The programme will be rebroadcast from recording by ČRo D-dur on 24 November from 8 p.m.

From Fairy Tale to Fairy Tale

Oskar Nedbal composed the ballet From Fairy Tale to Fairy Tale in Vienna in 1908 in close cooperation with the librettist Ladislav Novák. He conducted the premiere at Prague's National Theatre in the same year. Alongside Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, it is probably the most frequently performed title in the Czech Republic, an outright prototype of a ballet for children. The source for the libretto is the most popular Czech fairy tales. The author supported the work's audience accessibility with charming, novel ideas and clear, subtly simple melodies.

Young and temperamental

The spirited Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra is pleasant to listen to and, in contrast to Bohuslav Martinů's magnanimous and serious symphonic works, it is almost utilitarian in nature.

The young, temperamental composition premiered in Texas as part of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's season in 1951. It was conducted by Walter Hendl, at the time the orchestra's new thirty-four-year-old chief conductor, who had recently before that premiered Bohuslav Martinů's Piano Concerto No. 3 along with Rudolf Firkušný. The soloists of the two-violin concerto were Gerald and Wilfred Beal, twins who had captivated American audiences of the time not only for their playing, but also their age, having only come into the world in December 1932. At our concert, you can look forward to the incredible performances of two prominent musicians from the orchestra, concertmaster Vlastimil Kobrle and principal second violin David Pokorný.

Composer and conductor Jan Kučera|foto:Lukáš Hurník, Český rozhlas, Český rozhlas

Inevitable fate

The fourth of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's six symphonies, a composition from 1878, is both dramatic and melodic, as well as very subjective. It was produced during the composer's brief and ill-fated marriage. He considered it his masterpiece and, despite his own conviction that instrumental music does not have any "content", he did imprint a kind of programme on it. For example, in the first movement there is a theme of the inevitability of fate, an "unconquerable force that hangs over us like the sword of Damocles". The second movement is a depiction of sadness from the fact that many things are already in the past. And the finale brings joy in variations making use of a Russian folk melody, in the conductor's words "joy from the happiness of others".