The Prague Spring for the second time – with Ondrej Lenárd
We can expect a ceremonial and impressive atmosphere at the festival concert at which the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, with chief conductor Ondrej Lenárd, will perform Antonín Dvořák’s Requiem on Saturday 2 June. Solos will be performed by Pavla Vykopalová, Kateřina Jalovcová, Aleš Briscein and Zdeněk Plech, while the Prague Philharmonic Choir (led by choirmaster Lukáš Vasilek) will sing.
Antonín Dvořák began sketching out his most deeply thoughtful work at New Year 1890. There was no external stimulus to his writing – it was created neither following the death of somebody close to him nor in anticipation of his own death, while it was not commissioned by any musical institution. Rather Dvořák was approaching 50 and decided to weigh up his life and to express in essential way everything that he had achieved as a composer and person. His Requiem is simultaneously a testimony to his relationship to God and an attempt to answer the most basic questions surrounding the meaning of life. It expresses motifs of hope, fear of death, and pain at the departure of loved ones.
It was premiered in Britain’s Birmingham, directed by the composer himself, on 9 October 1891. The piece was performed for the first time in Prague at the National Theatre on 25 April the following year. Its greatest success was probably its Vienna production in 1900, when – despite Austrian listeners’ previously unfriendly attitude towards Dvořák – it became a huge triumph for the composer.
