Vivat republica!
This gala evening of the radio symphony players and their former lead conductor Ondrej Lenárd will mark two anniversaries.
A day after 28 October, when we commemorate 100 years since the founding of an independent Czechoslovakia, they performed a programme connecting the music of both countries.
The evening symbolically kicked off with the symphonic poem In the Tatras, which Vítězslav Novák dedicated to the Slovak mountain range. Simona Šaturová served up the Ad Astra cycle of songs by perhaps the most important Slovak composer of last century, Eugen Suchoň, from whose birth it has been 110 years in 2018.
The programme wrapped up with the masterful symphony of mourning Asrael, which Josef Suk conceived as a commemoration of his teacher and father-in-law Antonín Dvořák. While he was working on it, however, the angel of death, after which the work is named, also took Dvořák's daughter, Suk's wife Otilie.
Vítězslav Novák: In the Tatras, Op. 26
Eugen Suchoň: Ad Astra Songs, Op. 16
Josef Suk: Asrael, Op. 27
Ondrej Lenárd – conductor
Simona Šaturová – soprano
