Czech Philharmonic • Katia and Marielle Labèque

From the Basque region of France, then almost untouched by classical music, to the greatest concert halls in the world – this is the story of the Labèque sisters with a career spanning more than 50 years, who have been described as “the best piano duo in front of an audience today” (New York Times). But the shared story of the sisters, who have had a lifelong and intense relationship both professionally and personally, is much longer. The elder Katia first began playing piano under the tutelage of her mother, a pianist and piano teacher, and two years younger Marielle soon followed suit. In 1968, they entered the Paris Conservatory, but still as two soloists – the idea of forming a piano duo did not arise until after they had graduated from the conservatory, and so they then enrolled in a chamber music class there. They still remember how, while rehearsing Visions de l’Amen, they were suddenly interrupted by Olivier Messiaen, who happened to be passing by their class and wondered who was playing his piece. He was so impressed that he helped them record the work, which was not only their first recording experience but also an important invitation to the world of contemporary composers – after Messiaen, they worked with György Ligeti, Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio. Their career breakthrough came with their original arrangement of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which became one of the first gold records of classical music.

The Labèque sisters have performed in famous concert halls from the Musikverein in Vienna to Carnegie Hall in New York, have been guests at major festivals (BBC Proms, Salzburg, Tanglewood) and have appeared with the most celebrated orchestras in the world (Berlin Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, La Scala Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, etc.). “We don’t have the huge repertoire of a solo pianist or a violinist, but we have all the more freedom to create our own music and our own projects,” say the sisters, who collaborate with Baroque music ensembles (such as The English Baroque Soloists with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Il Giardino Armonico with Giovanni Antonini), but they also venture into the field of “non-artificial” (natural) music (Katia even played in a rock band).

The problem of the limited repertoire for piano duo is also solved by addressing contemporary composers. In addition to the above mentioned, in 2015 they gave the world premiere of Philip Glass’s Double Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel. Two years later they premiered Bryce Dessner’s Concerto for Two Pianos expressly written for them, and recorded it for the album “El Chan”. The Labèques also performed this piece in Prague’s Rudolfinum – although due to the pandemic (2021) without an audience, only in a streamed version. However, this was not the Labèque sisters’ first meeting with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra (whose chief conductor Semyon Bychkov is Marielle Labèque’s husband). In April 2017, the Dvořák Hall witnessed their performance of Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, and a year later they made their solo debut there.

“Noble, enchanting, sober, modest.” Music critics and orchestral players around the world have used these words to describe the legendary conductor Herbert Blomstedt, widening the usual vocabulary used in connection with most conductors. However, the fact that this contradicts the usual cliches in many ways does not mean that Blomstedt lacks the strength and ability to assert his clearly defined musical intentions. Anyone experiencing this conductor’s rehearsals in person, witnessing how much he concentrates on expressing the music’s very essence and its facts and circumstances, and encountering his tenacity in getting his aesthetic ideas realised, will probably be surprised by how few despotic measures are required to attain that goal. Herbert Blomstedt has always been the kind of artist whose professional competence and natural authority render any further justification superfluous. His work as a conductor is inseparably bound up with his religious and humane ethos, and his interpretations embody a combination of great fidelity to the score with analytical precision and a soulfulness that brings the music to life. During a career spanning more than 60 years, in the course of which he has stood before all of the world’s leading orchestras, this legendary conductor has earned the boundless respect of the music world.

He was born in the USA to Swedish parents who soon moved back to Sweden. Being drawn to music from his youth, he often played music and sang at home. He also admits that a major stimulus for his further musical development was the opening of a new concert hall in Gothenburg, where his family was living at the time. “I wanted to buy a season subscription, but I had to earn the money by selling newspapers. I got ten cents for every copy I sold, and a season subscription cost 42 Swedish crowns. So I had a lot of work to do to earn that much”, he recalls. Next he studied violin, conducting, and musicology at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, at Uppsala University, in Basil, in New York, and in Darmstadt.

He first came to greater international attention in 1953, when he won the Koussevitzky Prize. He made his conducting debut with the Stockholm orchestra the following year, followed by victory at the conducting competition in Salzburg. Then he served as the chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic, radio symphony orchestras of Sweden and Denmark, and the Staatskapelle Dresden. Later, he became the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, the chief conductor of the NDR Symphony Orchestra, and the music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Many of those orchestras have also given him the title of conductor laureate, and since 2019 he has been an honorary member of the Vienna Philharmonic. Besides holding several honorary doctorates and Germany’s Great Cross of Merit with Star, he has been elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. 

Even at an advanced age, his artistic zeal is undiminished because, as he himself says, natural curiosity is still keeping him young. Even at the age of 97, he continues to conduct the world’s greatest orchestras. He was last in Prague in 2021, when he appeared at the Rudolfinum for a Dvořák Prague Festival programme of Schubert and Bruckner with the Vienna Philharmonic.

During its more than 1,000 years of history, Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice fostered quite a number of composers who became famous in Italy and beyond. Among the church’s organists or maestri (music directors) were such truly illustrious figures of their day as Gioseffo Zarlino, Francesco Cavalli, Baldassare Galuppi, and Claudio Monteverdi. This was also the formative environment for Giovanni Gabrieli, who succeeded his uncle Andrea in 1585 as the church’s first organist.

Gabrieli witnessed the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque, and he was himself an important influence on the newly emerging musical style. Early in his career as a composer, he experimented with a variety of musical forms, but he decided rather quickly to concentrate on those genres that were closely tied to the milieu of the church where he was active. Besides the tradition of his great predecessors and of their manuscripts, which he was able to study and even have issued in print, Gabrielli’s music also audibly reflects the space inside Saint Mark’s Basilica itself. The highly segmented interior of that extraordinarily imposing cathedral afforded unusual acoustical possibilities to the composers working there. It is no wonder the church became the site of the development of the Venetian polychoral style that dominated sacred music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque, especially in northern Italy. The dispersion of choirs of vocalists or instrumentalists at various places around the cathedral and playful exploration of the effects of those groups’ dynamics, harmonies, and timbres made these compositions especially sonically rich, colourful, and shapely.

Canzonas were originally modelled after vocal forms, but Gabrieli developed them into longer, more complex polyphonic structures. While working at Saint Mark’s, he wrote several dozen of these rather brief compositions both for singers and for instrumental ensembles of various sizes, and especially for brass instruments. The arrival of the Baroque is clearly audible in these pieces. Composing based upon the principle of contrast became one of the building blocks providing a foundation for the emergence of concertante forms such as the sonata or the concerto grosso.

Few people had as strong an influence on the young Mozart as his older sister Marie Anna. Known at home as Nannerl, she was Wolfgang’s childhood playmate and a confidante to whom he addressed letters from his travels. Besides extraordinary musical talent, the brother and sister also shared the enjoyment of piquant wordplay. Wolfgang held his sister in deep admiration from an early age, learning from Nannerl and sharing his musical ideas with her. Nannerl was a talented pianist, and she made appearances together with her brother both at home in Salzburg and on tours around Europe, but she was forced to cease appearing in public when she reached adulthood; a career as a professional musician was entirely unthinkable for a young woman in those days.

Piano concertos are a common thread running throughout Mozart’s lifetime. In all, he wrote 27 of them, the first when he was 11 years old, and the last just a few weeks before his death. All his life, he worked to achieve perfect mastery of the form, and there is no doubt that his concertos represent one of the highpoints of the genre’s development. Especially in his late works, perfect formal mastery is wed to his practically inexhaustible melodic inventiveness. Moreover, Mozart premiered most of his concertos himself, so he did not hold back in them in terms of either expression or virtuosity.

The Concerto No. 10 in E flat major for two pianos fits perfectly within Mozart’s series of piano concertos. In 1779 while still employed at the court of the archbishop in Salzburg, he wrote the concerto in order to play it himself with Nannerl. The opening movement bristles with joyous energy, and the two soloists compliment each other in a dialogue that is cheerful and light in some places, majestic in others, with richly colourful interjections from the orchestra. The slow and lyrical second movement features a songful melody, and the tender chords of the two pianos are accompanied by the strings and woodwinds. The concluding rondo overflows with virtuosic motifs and themes played successively by the two soloists and the orchestra. The music comes across as a tongue-in-cheek representation of playful sibling rivalry.

Franz Schubert began work on Symphony in C major (D 944) in the summer of 1825; the final score is dated March 1828. Later, to distinguish it from Symphony in C major (D 589) of 1818, it was given the title “Great”. The numbering of Schubert’s symphonies is inconsistent. Their first complete edition was prepared by Johannes Brahms, who put The “Great” C major as No. 8 after Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony in B minor. A later edition also included a fragment of Symphony in E major from 1821, and The “Great” C major was listed as No. 9, but a new critical edition again excluded the fragment from the series. Chronologically, the “Great” Symphony in C major is Schubert’s last symphony.

Its journey to the concert stage was not an easy one. After its completion, Schubert sent it to the Society of Friends of Music (Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde) in Vienna, which ran a conservatory and – like the Prague Conservatory – had a student orchestra, to give it the first performance. However, the young players struggled with its complexities and the symphony was ultimately withdrawn. When Robert Schumann visited Vienna in 1839, he learned about the existence of the autograph from Schubert’s brother Ferdinand. Upon Schumann’s initiative, the symphony was premiered on 21 March 1839 by the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, conducted by Felix Mendelssohn.

In his article for Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schumann wrote that those who do not know this symphony know very little about Schubert. “Here, beside sheer musical mastery of the technique of composition is life in every fiber, color in the finest shadings, meaning everywhere, the acutest etching of detail, and all flooded with a Romanticism [...] Consider the heavenly length of the symphony, like a thick novel in four volumes, perhaps by Jean Paul, who was also incapable of coming to an end, and to be sure for the best of reasons: to allow the reader, at a later point, to re-create it for himself... It is still evidence of Schubert’s extraordinary talent that he who heard so little of his own instrumental work during his lifetime could achieve such an idiomatic treatment both of individual instruments and of the whole orchestra.” Schumann could not avoid comparing Schubert with Beethoven, the symphony composer par excellence, but he saw the value of Schubert’s work in “its relationship of complete independence from Beethoven’s symphonies. Conscious of his more modest powers, Schubert refrains from imitating the grotesque forms and audacious relationships that we encounter in Beethoven’s later works. Schubert gives us a work of grace and yet innovation. The symphony has made an impression on us like none other since Beethoven.”

The first movement begins with a slow introduction, giving rise to the three themes of the exposition. This is followed by an extended development and a brief recapitulation with a coda, restating the opening theme of the introduction. The second movement is in a sonata form with the individual sections not clearly separated from each other, forming a continuous stream of music. It juxtaposes two thematic groups. The third movement, scherzo, is characterized by a distinctive rhythmic pattern. The final fourth movement anticipates the further development of symphony, which culminated in the works of Mahler and Bruckner in the 19th century, in which the structural elements of the previous movements appear in new transformations.