Czech Philharmonic ⬩ Karen Gomyo

“There are sounds and ideas suspended in the air, and I find myself overeating, swallowing them up. I can barely manage to write it down on paper”, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky boasted in a letter to a friend in June 1874. He was already at work on a musical tribute to the painter and architect Viktor Hartmann titled Pictures at an Exhibition. Mussorgsky’s dear friend Hartmann had died in August 1873, and the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg held an exhibition of his works, which the composer attended. Inspired by what he had seen, Mussorgsky decided to transform ten of the images into music. The piano original was not played very often, but when Maurice Ravel arranged the work for orchestra in 1922, it became a hit.

Max Bruch’s First Violin Concerto underwent revisions; creating the work did not come easily. “Work is progressing slowly on my Violin Concerto—I don’t feel very secure in this territory. Do you think writing a violin concerto is too daring?” he wrote to his former teacher Hiller in November 1865. Whatever answer he got back, his many revisions finally paid off. The result was the composer’s most famous work.

The opera Nixon in China probably still remains John Adams’s most famous work, but he was again unafraid to tackle a current topic in his recently created composition Frenzy. “For me, ‘frenzy’ sums up the feeling, at times overwhelming, of contemplating the current world around us, especially as it is imagined in our daily doses of digital news and information, much of which we consume without regard to its subversive and subconscious influence on our mood”, Adams says about the composition written three years ago. He dedicated his “short symphony” to Simon Rattle, but at the Rudolfinum we will hear it performed by Semyon Bychkov.