Czech Philharmonic ⬩ Leonidas Kavakos

Last December, when Leonidas Kavakos appeared with the Czech Philharmonic for the first time in the dual role of soloist and conductor, it was obvious that the players and the soloist would want to repeat this collaboration as soon as possible. The musical and human understanding between them was clear both on stage and from the auditorium and as soon as an opportunity arose to entrust one of the programmes of the new season to this extraordinary artist, we did not hesitate even for a second. His last programme was a tribute to Ludwig van Beethoven and this time Leonidas Kavakos has chosen the music of Mozart and Brahms for his Prague appearance.

The symphony and violin concerto you will hear in the first half of the programme are the music of a very young composer. Mozart wrote his Violin Concerto in G Major at the age of nineteen and the Symphony in G Minor when he was just seventeen. In a letter to his father, he called the Concerto in G Major the “Salzburg Concerto”. Musicologists attribute this name to the use of a local dance theme at the beginning of the third movement. The symphony has come to be known as the “Little G Minor” in order to differentiate it from the more famous Symphony No. 40, also in G minor. Czech film director Miloš Forman made the “Little G Minor” famous by choosing it as the music for the beginning of his celebrated film Amadeus.

“Hoch auf’m Berg, tief im Tal grüß ich dich viel tausend mal!” “From the mountain peaks and the depths of the valley, I greet thee many thousands of times!“ Brahms heard a shepherd’s tune with these lyrics while in the Alps and as a birthday greeting for Clara Schumann, he inserted it into the introduction to the fourth movement of his First Symphony. Because of the work’s compositional mastery and the use of a paraphrase of the Ode to Joy theme, this symphony is sometimes referred to as Beethoven’s Tenth.