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Czech Philharmonic • Anastasia Kobekina
Rudolfinum — Dvořák Hall
Price from 500 to 1650 CZK
Bryce Dessner is the very first artist given the title of composer-in-residence by the Czech Philharmonic. Our audience will hear the European premiere of his Cello Concerto. Representing Dessner’s sources of musical inspiration are a miniature by Henri Dutilleux and Igor Stravinsky’s bewitching Rite of Spring.
Programme
Henri Dutilleux
Métaboles
Bryce Dessner
Cello Concerto taking the form of a tone poem (European premiere)
Igor Stravinsky
The Rite of Spring
Performers
Anastasia Kobekina cello
Semyon Bychkov conductor
Czech Philharmonic
Subscription series A
The sale of individual tickets for subscription concerts (orchestral, chamber, educational) will begin on 2 June 2025 at 10 a.m.
Individual tickets for all public dress rehearsals will go on sale on 10 September 2025 at 10 a.m.
Customer Service of Czech Philharmonic
Tel.: +420 227 059 227
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“I was told in conservatory to focus on one thing. And I ignored that advice.”
The American composer and guitarist Bryce Dessner crosses and disrupts the boundaries between musical styles. He sees the future of the arts in the breaking of the bonds of genre restrictions, allowing all artists to speak in their own languages and to collaborate, crossing over between artistic fields and countries. He himself is moving towards such a future in all of the directions mentioned.
The son of a jazz musician, he began with the flute and later studied the classical guitar. Since 1999, he and his twin brother have been playing in the indie rock band The National. In 2013, he first classical album Aheym demonstrated the impossibility of classifying him. He also composes film music: he wrote soundtracks for the Oscar-winning film Revenant (2015) and for The Two Popes (2019).
Originally from Ohio, Dessner is a long-term resident of France. There, in the French Basque Country, he became a neighbour of Semyon Bychkov, to whom he dedicated the composition Mari, named for the Basque forest goddess. The Czech Philharmonic gave that work its postponed Czech premiere in December 2021.
In Dessner’s thinking, nature and creativity are closely related. He sees both as sets of mutually integrating structures. “To me, an orchestra is itself an instrument. I like the feeling of diversity and plurality in music, where you can feel a kind of vastness that is perhaps most comparable to nature. When you look at the sea or the mountains, you can perceive both a simplicity and a complexity. That’ why I like the orchestra—for the creative possibilities it offers.”
The programme also includes Métaboles, Dessner’s favourite work by Henri Dutilleux, which he characterises as a bit of musical poetry similar to the work of the French Impressionists. He also calls Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring a key influence on his music and his style.
Performers
Anastasia Kobekina cello
Semyon Bychkov conductor
In addition to conducting at Prague’s Rudolfinum, Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic in the 2023/2024 season, took the all Dvořák programmes to Korea and across Japan with three concerts at Tokyo’s famed Suntory Hall. In spring, an extensive European tour took the programmes to Spain, Austria, Germany, Belgium, and France and, at the end of year 2024, the Year of Czech Music culminated with three concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York.
Among the significant joint achievements of Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic is the release of a 7-CD box set devoted to Tchaikovsky’s symphonic repertoire and a series of international residencies. In 2024, Semjon Byčkov with the Czech Philharmonic concentrated on recording Czech music – a CD was released with Bedřich Smetanaʼs My Homeland and Antonín Dvořákʼs last three symphonies and ouvertures.
Bychkovʼs repertoire spans four centuries. His highly anticipated performances are a unique combination of innate musicality and rigorous Russian pedagogy. In addition to guest engagements with the world’s major orchestras and opera houses, Bychkov holds honorary titles with the BBC Symphony Orchestra – with whom he appears annually at the BBC Proms – and the Royal Academy of Music, who awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in July 2022. Bychkov was named “Conductor of the Year” by the International Opera Awards in 2015 and, by Musical America in 2022.
Bychkov began recording in 1986 and released discs with the Berlin Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio, Royal Concertgebouw, Philharmonia Orchestra and London Philharmonic for Philips. Subsequently a series of benchmark recordings with WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne featured Brahms, Mahler, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Strauss, Verdi, Glanert and Höller. Bychkov’s 1993 recording of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin with the Orchestre de Paris continues to win awards, most recently the Gramophone Collection 2021; Wagner’s Lohengrin was BBC Music Magazine’s Record of the Year (2010); and Schmidt’s Symphony No. 2 with the Vienna Philharmonic was BBC Music Magazine’s Record of the Month (2018).
Semyon Bychkov has one foot firmly in the culture of the East and the other in the West. Born in St Petersburg in 1952, he studied at the Leningrad Conservatory with the legendary Ilya Musin. Denied his prize of conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic, Bychkov emigrated to the United States in 1975 and, has lived in Europe since the mid-1980’s. In 1989, the same year he was named Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, Bychkov returned to the former Soviet Union as the St Petersburg Philharmonic’s Principal Guest Conductor. He was appointed Chief Conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra (1997) and Chief Conductor of Dresden Semperoper (1998).
Compositions
Henri Dutilleux
Métaboles
Bryce Dessner
Cello Concerto taking the form of a tone poem
Igor Stravinsky
The Rite of Spring
In 1912, Igor Stravinsky was also 30 years old. 59 more years of life were still ahead of him, and he was at work on his most daring work to date. He was known to all of Paris, the centre of the artistic avant-garde at the time. Paris is also where the progressive Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev had been working since 1909. His ensemble’s productions of Stravinsky’s ballets The Firebird and Petrushka had been the talk of Paris, but the greatest event was yet to come. On 29 May 1913, the newly opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées gave the premiere of his third ballet, The Rite of Spring, subtitled Picture of Pagan Russia. A riot ensued, pitting the disapproving, disgusted conservative part of the audience against enthusiastic progressives. Nothing would ever be the same again—not only the music, but also the choreography and costumes differed from anything that had come before.
“The idea of The Rite of Spring came to me while I was still composing Firebird,” recalled Igor Stravinsky 45 years after the work’s premiere in his book Conversations. “I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” In the summer of 1911 in Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), Stravinsky signed a contract with Diaghilev for the composing of the last of his three early ballets. He worked on the composition in 1911 and 1912, and he made the final revisions in March 1913. To prepare himself to compose the music, Stravinsky joined the stage designer and scenario author Nicholas Roerich, who was also an archaeologist, on a trip to the Russian town Talashkino near Smolensk to study the rituals of Slavic tribes at a local centre for the folk arts. Rather than using specific folk themes, they were interested in archetypes—the mystical, wild, primitive, and uncivilised—that they would present in opposition to the bourgeois conventions of the day and to excessive sensitivity in the arts.
Stravinsky did not borrow any specific Russian folk songs, but The Rite of Spring is still the high point of his creative period under the influence of folklore. The only actual folk melody in The Rite of Spring is played by the bassoon at the very beginning, but the composer later said that the tune was not Russian—it supposedly came from an anthology of Lithuanian folk music that he found in Warsaw. In 1943, Stravinsky’s contemporary Béla Bartók, himself a folklore enthusiastic, called The Rite of Spring “the apotheosis of the music of rural Russia”, and about the ballet he declared: “Rhythmic cells that contract and expand can be found commonly in the music of Russia and eastern Europe.”
For Stravinsky, the character of the theme opened up incredible musical possibilities, particularly in the use of the power of elementary rhythm with the whole orchestra acting as a gigantic percussion instrument employing fierce rhythmic pulsation, polyrhythm, and the rapid alternation of metres. Later, Stravinsky recalled playing the beginning of the composition for Diaghilev for the first time at the piano. “Diaghilev asked if those repeated chords would go on much longer. And I answered ‘until the end, my dear’” Also in terms of tonality, The Rite of Spring went beyond tradition with hints of bitonality and tritonality, as Stravinsky superimposes chords separated by as little as a semitone.
Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography was also in keeping with the totally revolutionary conception of the music. The dancers’ primitive movements were entirely contrary to the aesthetic ideals of classical ballet. In hindsight, the choreography and Nijinsky’s rather inadequate comprehension of the innovative music could be chiefly blamed for the failure of the work’s premiere. A year later, a concert performance of The Rite of Spring in Paris met with public acclaim, and the work became a definitive milestone on the path towards modern music.