Prague Nightlife
Prague Proms
Notte Alla Scala „Viva Verdi!“
The Last Night of this year's Prague Proms will celebrate Italian opera. Marcello Rota will together with the CNSO pay a tribute to the music of Giuseppe Verdi in the concert performance of Verdi's Aida. The first half of the evening will belong to the arias from Verdi's operas Giovanna d'Arco, Attila, Macbeth, Don Carlos, Luisa Miller, Il trovatore, and La forza del destino. Although the giant Sphinx-head will not stare down on the orchestra playing the Triumphal March in uniforms, there will be a lot to see and listen to. The solo parts will be sung exclusively by Italian singers and guest performers of the famous La Scala.
On the contrary to the popular belief, the opera was not written to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, nor that of the Khedivial Opera House, but it was commissioned by Ismail Pasha, Khedive of Egypt, for performance in January 1871. Aida met with a great acclaim when it finally opened in Cairo on December 24, 1871. And the opera will be a dignified closing of this year's Prague Proms annual.
Viva di settimo anno di Prague Proms Festival 2011!
Date: Wed July 22, 2010, 7.00 pm
Place: Municipal House, Smetana Hall
Performers: Czech National Symphony Orchestra / Marcello Rota, conductor; Carmela Apollonio- soprano, Tiziana Carraro – mezzo; Mario Malagnini – tenor; Gianfranco Montresor – baritone; Paolo Pecchioli & Gianluca Breda – bass / Kühn Mixed Choir; Marek Vorlíček – choirmaster
Program: Giuseppe Verdi – Giovanna d'Arco, Attila, Macbeth, Don Carlo, Luisa Miller, Il trovatore, La forza del destino / Aida, Acts 1 and 2 in concert performance
Prague Spring International Music Festival
Founding of the festival
In 1946 Prague and the whole Czechoslovak Republic celebrated the first anniversary of the end of the Second World War. At the same time, the Czech Philharmonic was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, and the Prague Spring International Music Festival was born.
It was the result of almost seventy years of endeavours by people involved in music in Prague, including the German-speaking population, to organize annual music festivals with the participation of top soloists and orchestras from all over the world.
Those endeavours go back to the 1880s and opera series of works of individual composers, held at the Neues Deutsches Theater, Prague. From 1900 till the outbreak of the First World War, fourteen years later, they were held under the name Mai-Festspiele, in which plays and concerts were added to otherwise solely operatic productions. In the meantime, this initiative was joined by the National Theatre, Prague, with its own series of operas by Czech composers, and, in spring 1904, the memorable Czech Festival of Music, with the Czech Philharmonic, first took place.
In the interwar years, 1918 to 1939, similarly ambitious music festivals, with musicians from all over the world, were held in Prague three times under the auspices of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). In the difficult years of the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia the conductor Václav Talich revived endeavours to hold a regular festival called Pražské hudební máje.
Present at the birth of the Prague Spring was another great conductor, Rafael Kubelík, the Artistic Director of the Czech Philharmonic. From the very beginning, this initiative was favourably received by Czech music-lovers and politicians. The patron of the new festival was the Czechoslovak President, Edvard Beneš. In his official greetings to the Festival he stated:
I welcome the idea of organizing an international music festival, which, after the difficult years of war, will bring to Prague the best composers and performers from the countries of our allies and friends, and I wish this important artistic event much success.
From its inauguration right up to the present day, the Prague Spring Festival has taken place every year with the support of the top institutions of the state.
The world at the Prague Spring
The first years of the Festival put the emphasis not only on Czech music and its leading composers, like Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Leoš Janáček, and Bohuslav Martinů, but naturally also on the music and musicians of the four great powers of the victorious anti-Hitler coalition. Together with musicians from the USA (for example, the conductor Leonard Bernstein made his international debut at the 1946 and 1947 Prague Spring Festival), Great Britain, and France, top soloists, singers, and conductors from the Soviet Union also participated from the inception of the Festival.
Famous debutants and the Prague Spring Competition
Apart from the virtuoso violinist David Oistrakh, who was already established in the world of music, members of the up-and-coming generation of musicians in Russia also used to come to Prague every year. In competition with their colleagues from other countries they underwent their rites of initiation at the Prague Spring Festival. Among the most famous are the phenomenal pianistSviatoslav Richter and the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the winner of the international competition of young talents. This competition has been part of the Festival since its second year, 1947.
Ten years later, the Prague Spring became a founding member of the World Federation of International Music Competitions, Geneva. The successes achieved by dozens of these young musicians in the Prague Spring Competition were the touchstone of their maturity as artists, and usually launched their careers in other countries around the world.
Antonín Matzner