Concerts and festivals

The 2008 Concert Season
Bertramka’s concert season begins on April 12 and concludes with a concert on October 29, 2008. Just as in past years, many of Mozart’s pieces will be performed here, as well as pieces by his contemporaries and pieces by modern composers. The majority of the concerts will take place in Bertramka’s concert hall, though during the summer months (July and August) selected concerts will be held in the picturesque setting of the garden. In 2007 we commemorated the 180th anniversary of the death of Ludvig van Beethoven with the “Mozart Meets Beethoven” project, a concert series which featured all of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s string quartets in performances by the foremost Czech ensembles. We will be examining the string quartet during this year as well in the concert series “Quartets of Two Centuries, 1750–1950,” which again presents a number of Mozart’s quartets as well as the works of other composers who lived during the given time period, (including Dvořák, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Ravel, Smetana and Schubert). The project also features such leading Czech string quartets as the Talich, Kocián, Stamic, Škampa, M. Nostitz and Zemlinský quartets. The Czech string quartet tradition is a grand one, and very significant in terms of the propagation of Czech music throughout the world.

Last year we inaugurated the “Divertimenti in Prague” summer festival under the auspices of master Josef Suk. He himself considers the string quartet to be the “ideal ensemble” and is quite fond of chamber concerts of this type. The festival continues this year as well and will take place during the second half of August in the Bertramka garden. We have the honor to announce that the members of the world-famous Pražák Quartet have accepted our invitation. Concertgoers will have an opportunity to hear the works of Mozart, Smetana, Dvořák, Janáček, Borodin, Haydn and other composers. I

n the concerts listed under the title “Mozart vs. Salieri” we would like to aquaint listeners with Mozart’s Italian contemporary, the excellent musician and conductor Antonio Salieri. After 1766 he made his second home in Vienna, where he worked as the kapellmeister and composer of the imperial court. He also ranked among the best teachers of his age, particularly in the areas of voice, composition and music theory, as evidenced by his pupils, who included Ludvig van Beethoven, Johann Nepomukk Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt, Franz Xaver Süssmayr and even Mozart’s son Franz Xaver. Most people who have heard the name Salieri know him primarily as the man guilty of killing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Aleksander Sergeevich Pushkin, for example, wrote the beautiful poem “Mozart and Salieri” in which Salieri is branded a murderer whose motive was the oft-quoted uprising of the “spirit of mediocrity.” Further misconceptions about the relationship between Salieri and Mozart were reinforced by Miloš Forman’s world-famous film Amadeus. These misconceptions are often due to distortions of history, mistakes in time relationships between events and blatant factual errors. Salieri had no need to claim Mozart’s compositions as his own, nor even to envy his younger contemporary. Musical historians have long since dismissed the idea of any contribution by Salieri to Mozart’s death. On the contrary, all period documents, letters and event testify to the fact that Mozart and Salieri respected each other and had a very proper relationship.

MOZARTIANA IUVENTUS 2008
Dear visitors to Bertramka, welcome to the 10th annual Mozartiana Iuventus music festival, a small exhibition of the fruit of the professional endeavors of young Czech musicians. New social conditions here have offered them wisdom, both general and musical, and many of them have been out to explore the “great, wide world,” shaking off the feeling of inferiority to Europe and the rest of the world which was, up until recently, justified. For us, these young people are a promise that the Czech lands will once again become, if perhaps not the “conservatory of Europe,” as the rather often quoted phrase would have it, then at least a mature musical region which will inspire and cultivate its people and attract the rest of the world to interesting cultural events. From this perspective it will be very interesting to observe, for example, the performances by the German students of Czech violinist Ivan Ženatý, or in other words, what the Czech violin school has to give to the young representatives of such a musical superpower as is Germany. In all our affirmation of the modern and new, however, we must not forget that which is good, traditional and time-tested—which is precisely why we meet here on the grounds of venerable Bertramka, and precisely why the golden thread running through all the concert programs of this series is something of the work of the legendary composer from Salzburg. Besides the sort of “obligation” to present Mozart’s music at each concert of this festival, another element which has proved useful is the loading (read: enriching) of the majority of the concert programs with something brand new from the modern Czech literature. This confrontation is profitable for all concerned: for the concertgoers it is a reinforcement of their grasp of the pieces’ musical-historical contexts; for the performers it is good artistic hygiene, an opportunity to temporarily put aside time-worn interpretational procedures, a chance to be inspired by new repertoire. For composers, it is a welcome presentation of their work, as well as a treatment of the piece by unprejudiced youth. Thus we are very curious about the pieces which will receive their world premieres here at Bertramka during this year’s Mozartiana Iuventus, about the quartet by František Xaver Thuri (in which something of a Neo-Baroque stylistic inspiration will undoubtably appear), or the sonata for the non-traditional “Brahmsian” horn trio by the English composer Andrew Downes, or the violin sonata by the Czech-English composer Karel Janovický, whose music has recently graced the halls of Bertramka, or the fourth quartet by Václav Zahradník. Bertramka is a former country settlement (named after its one-time owner, František of Bertram, sub specie aeternatis an insignificant Prague tax official). Passing through narrow gates of Bertramka, visitors find themselves transported by its genius loci out of time and space, and the rushed, nervous metropolis is suddenly transformed as if by magic into the somewhat sleepy Old-World estate which once welcomed the great Mozart. Its inimitable atmosphere brings generation after generation of music-lovers back to its halls from Prague and all over the world. Surely these young performing artists at Bertramka will again attract a young audience and convince us all that the future of serious music is not so badly off after all, that it is enough to search diligently and choose wisely, and that Bertramka, where venerable tradition meets with professional performance and bold programming, is a good place to return to.