Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava
You will be able to hear some beautiful classical music tracks at the twentieth Pohoda. Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra will perform works of the most famous Czech composers (Smetana – “Vltava”, Dvorak – “Carnival”, Suk – “Fantastic Scherzo”, and Janacek – “The Ballad of Blanik”), as well as the Slovak song perhaps most played by orchestras abroad, "Musica Slovaca" by Ilja Zeljenka.
06. June 2016
JFO
Radio Orchestra, the predecessor of Janáček Philharmonic, was formed already at the end of the twenties of the last century. The body cooperated with composers and songwriters such as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Hindemith, as well as top musicians and singers such as A. Navarra, J. Suk, J. Carreras, and P. Domingo. Since 2014, the head of the Philharmonic is the excellent German conductor Heiko Mathias Förster, who has conducted also the Munich Symphony Orchestra and the New Philharmonic Orchestra Westphalia.
PROGRAMME
Ostrava Philharmonic Orchestra will play works that have long been appealing to a wider audience than just the listeners of the radio stations Devín, D-dur, and Bartok. They will play Leoš Janáčekʼs, the greatest personality of the Moravian music, symphonic poem “The Ballad of Blanik”. They will also perform Jozef Sukʼs “Fantastic Scherzo”, a song filled with youthful, optimistic atmosphere and inventiveness. Janáčeks are up to the overture Carnival by Antonin Dvorak, too. Carnival is the second part of the cycle Nature, life, love. This sound intoxicating music gives the impression of maximum life energy. The most famous works of the Philharmonicʼs repertoire is the symphonic poem Vltava (it makes part of the cycle My Country) by Bedrich Smetana. It describes the flow of the longest Czech river from the source to the confluence with the Elbe. Vltava is one of the best works of Romanticism and together with Dvorak's "Humoresque" it is one of the most played works of classical music in the world. One of the most played works of Slovak music was created exactly 100 years after the song Vltava and is also strongly linked with the landscape. At that time, Zeljenka was expelled from the Union of Slovak Composers for his resistance against the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, the editors of folk music in the Slovak Radio ordered from him a song for the contest Prix de musique folklorique. Using the folk motifs of Čičmany and Dolný Vadičov region, he composed a piece for chamber string orchestra “Musica Slovaca”. As the portal Vinylworld describes it: “It is comfort with a touch of gentle melancholy, a nonviolent work with folklore without the danger of slipping into banality or kitsch”.
The most emotive works of Czech masters and a piece of tunes from Slovak villages by Ilja Zeljenka performed by the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra will surely give you afternoon goosebumps at Pohoda 2016.