The Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Prague Spring Music Competition
The Prague Spring International Music Competition has been running since 1947. This year the competition is open to violinists and trumpet players.
The Radio Orchestra with conductor Stanislav Vavřínek will be accompanying violinists in the 3rd round. The finalists will be performing one of the following concertos:
Johannes Brahms: Concerto for Violin in D major, Op. 77
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Concerto for Violin in D major, Op. 35
Antonín Dvořák: Concerto for Violin in A minor, Op. 53
Jean Sibelius: Concerto for Violin in D minor, Op. 47
The Prague Spring International Music Competition will also involve the collaboration of SOČR conductor Jan Kučera. For the competition in the second discipline, the trumpet, he has written a piece with piano accompaniment entitled The Joker, and in the final round he will be accompanying the trumpet players together with the Hradec Králové Philharmonic.
The idea to organise an international music competition during the Prague Spring festival was masterminded in 1946 by Rafael Kubelík with members of the Czech Philharmonic. That same year the rules were drawn up for a violin competition whose entrants would compete for the Jan Kubelík Prize. The first competition was held in May 1947 during the Prague Spring International Music Festival. Jan Masaryk, Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, was Honorary Chairman of the competition.
Among the first violinists to win the competition were Igor Bezrodny, Victor Pikaizen and Alan Loveday, in 1950 it was the turn of cellists Mstislav Rostropovich and Daniil Shafran, and the Smetana Quartet, who launched their lengthy career on the basis of their success at the competition.
The Prague Spring Competition is one of the world’s notable international music competitions, not only because it brought international recognition for a large number of musicians (prizewinners also include James Galway, Maurice Bourgue, Natalia Gutman, Natalia Shakhovskaya, Boris Pergamenschikow, Jan Panenka, Michel Becquet, Bernard Soustrot, Jean-Louis Capezzali, Philippe Cuper, Dagmar Pecková, Štefan Margita, among others), but also for the fact that it was one of the founding members of the World Federation of International Music Competitions in Geneva (WFIMC). This federation affiliates approximately one hundred competition organisations, but only a few of them hold multidisciplinary competitions each year as in the case of the Prague Spring Competition.
