Czech Philharmonic • Giovanni Antonini

The Italian soprano Giulia Semenzato is acclaimed internationally mainly for the Baroque and Mozart repertoire. She graduated from the Benedetto Marcello Conservatoire in Venice, then under the guidance of Rosa Dominguez at the Schola Cantorum in Basel she perfected her interpreting of early music, the subject she now teaches at Vienna’s Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst. Thanks to victory at the competition Toti dal Monte di Treviso, she made her debut on the operatic stage (Elisetta in Cimarosa’s opera Il Matrimonio Segreto), then she secured international fame at the Bologna International Vocal Competition and the Cesti Competition in Innsbruck. Since then, she has performed at such famed venues as the Teatro La Fenice, the Teatro alla Scala, London’s Covent Garden, the Zurich Opernhaus, and the Théâtre national de lʼOpéra-Comique in Paris. She has also appeared at the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music and the Salzburg Festival. She appears regularly on the concert stage with Giovanni Antonini and other illustrious conductors including René Jacobs, Riccardo Minasi, and Václav Luks.

The young mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston appears frequently on the world’s most important stages including London’s Wigmore Hall and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdamm interpreting the works of G. F. Handel. Her fame was secured by victory at the Handel Singing Competition in London in 2018, and her career has been advancing promisingly with performances of Israel in Egypt with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Theodora with the Philharmonia Baroque in San Francisco, and Judas Maccabaeus at Berlin’s Philharmonie with the RIAS Kammerchor.

Helen Charlston has participated in the Rising Star programme of the famed Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and in the academy Le Jardin des Voix organised by Les Arts Florissants, and she is now a BBC New Generation Artist. She specialises mainly in early music ranging from Monteverdi to Mozart (although she was brilliant in Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah alongside Carolyn Sampson and Andrew Staples in the summer at the BBC Proms), as can be seen from, among other things, her CD with arias of the 17th century, which earned her a 2023 Gramophone Award.

Patrick Grahl is a famed interpreter of repertoire including the music of Bach. Grahl’s birthplace, Leipzig, is closely associated with that Baroque master. It was there that Grahl got his start as a singer in the famed St Thomas Choir, graduated from the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Academy of Music, and even won the prestigious J. S. Bach International Competition. He began his operatic career while still a student. His focus is now more on concert and oratorio repertoire, with the names appearing most frequently on his programmes being W. A. Mozart, J. Haydn, and J. S. Bach, of course, many of whose compositions Grahl has also recorded. He has collaborated with important orchestras around the world (Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, L’Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, London Symphony Orchestra) and with acclaimed conductors (Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Danielle Gatti), and he also gives solo recitals. For example, he appears on stage with the pianist Daniel Heide, with whom he has collaborated on an album of the Classical and Romantic song repertoire. Grahl and Heide also appear as guests at the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg.

The British bass-baritone Ashley Riches initially studied English at Cambridge University, where he belonged to the Choir of King’s College led by Stephen Cleobury. Later, he studied singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. A former Jette Parker Young Artist, he got the chance to appear at the Royal Opera in Covent Garden. Since then, he has also performed with the English National Opera, at the Potsdamer Winteroper, in Tokyo, and at the Glyndebourne and Grange festivals. His greatest successes on the concert stage include appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra, and with the conductors Sir Simon Rattle and Sir John Eliot Gardiner at Carnegie Hall. As a former BBC New Generation Artist from 2016 to 2018, he is equally at home at recitals with such piano accompanists as Graham Johnson, Iain Burnside, Julius Drake, Joseph Middleton, and Anna Tilbrook. In 2021 he released his debut solo album with the title Musical Zoo.

The Prague Philharmonic Choir (PPC), founded in 1935 by the choirmaster Jan Kühn, is the oldest professional mixed choir in the Czech Republic. Their current choirmaster and artistic director is Lukáš Vasilek, and the second choirmaster is Lukáš Kozubík.

The choir has earned the highest acclaim in the oratorio and cantata repertoire, performing with the world’s most famous orchestras. In this country, they collaborate regularly with the Czech Philharmonic and the Prague Philharmonia. They also perform opera as the choir-in-residence of the opera festival in Bregenz, Austria.

Programmes focusing mainly on difficult, lesser-known works of the choral repertoire. For voice students, they are organising the Academy of Choral Singing, and for young children there is a cycle of educational concerts.

The choir has been honoured with the 2018 Classic Prague Award and the 2022 Antonín Dvořák Prize.

Lukáš Vasilek studied conducting and musicology. Since 2007, he has been the chief choirmaster of the Prague Philharmonic Choir (PPC). Most of his artistic work with the choir consists of rehearsing and performing the a cappella repertoire and preparing the choir to perform in large-scale cantatas, oratorios, and operatic projects, during which he collaborates with world-famous conductors and orchestras (such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Czech Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic, and the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic).

Besides leading the PPC, he also engages in other artistic activities, especially in collaboration with the vocal ensemble Martinů Voices, which he founded in 2010. As a conductor or choirmaster, his name appears on a large number of recordings that the PPC have made for important international labels (Decca Classics, Supraphon); in recent years, he has been devoting himself systematically to the recording of Bohuslav Martinů’s choral music. His recordings have received extraordinary acclaim abroad and have earned honours including awards from the prestigious journals Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, and Diapason.

In the modern history of the Czech Philharmonic, when the first steps were being taken towards an educational programme, the idea arose in 2006 – while Václav Riedlbauch was still the executive director – of giving symphonic concerts for student audiences, i.e. for a new generation of listeners. The choice fell to the former Prague (later Czech) Youth Orchestra, an ensemble with many years of tradition of a youthful, enthusiastic approach to music. This worked wonderfully because the students in the audience saw their peers on stage. Bound by their love of music, these musicians gave performances from 2006 to 2010 under the leadership of the conductor Marko Ivanović, playing such works as Janáček’s Sinfonietta, Dvořák’s New World Symphony, Cello Concerto, and Te Deum, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet suite.

When new management took over in 2011, the Czech Philharmonic greatly expanded its educational activities, and that was an opportunity for renewal of the student orchestra’s activities, renamed as the Czech Youth Philharmonic. The idea is to give the rising generation of musicians – mostly students at music schools, whether grammar schools with a music emphasis, conservatoires, or academies of music – the regular opportunity of rehearsing and performing great symphonic, concertante, and choral works. Over time, the efforts turned towards creating a permanent orchestra that would support its members in the perfecting of their ensemble playing and in the creation of long-term relationships and mutual understanding. The Czech Youth Philharmonic musicians also serve as “bearers of light” in relation to their peers by showing them that young people can love classical music and can present it enthusiastically to others.

Since the 2013/2014 season, the orchestra has been performing regularly at concerts of the Czech Philharmonic’s educational series Four Steps to the New World (under the baton of Marko Ivanović), and at the series Penguins at the Rudolfinum (with Vojtěch Jouza) and Who’s Afraid of the Philharmonic? (with Ondřej Vrabec). In April 2019, the Czech Youth Philharmonic appeared with Ida Kelarová and the Čhavorenge children’s choir at Šun Devloro concerts – musical celebrations of International Romani Day. In November 2019, the orchestra played under the baton of Robert Kružík at the Students’ Day Concert with the participation of Joachim Gauck and Petr Pithart.

In June 2020, the conductor Simon Rattle came to Prague insisting that he did not want to conduct just the Czech Philharmonic, but also “some orchestra with young people.” When the choice fell to the Czech Youth Philharmonic, that was an enormous challenge for its members. Sir Simon enjoyed working with the young musicians, and he was unsparing in his praise: “The Czech Youth Philharmonic reminds me of the orchestra of the Verbier Festival, which is made up of the best music students from all around the world, led by players from the Metropolitan Opera. That’s the level they are on.” In February 2021, the Czech Youth Philharmonic first appeared under the baton of chief conductor Semyon Bychkov in the televised concert “A přece se učí” (“But Learning Continues”).

In the 2022/2023 and 2023/2024 seasons, the Czech Youth Philharmonic debuted as part of the Czech Philharmonicʼs subscription concerts with conductors Semyon Bychkov, Giovanni Antonini, and Jakub Hrůša. In the “Steps into the New World” series, young musicians, under the baton of Marko Ivanović, performed works by Bizet, Grieg, Smetana, Vivaldi, Piazzolla, Mussorgsky, and others.

A native of Milan, Giovanni Antonini has long been acclaimed worldwide for his innovative and polished approach to performing the Baroque and Classical repertoire while fully respecting the precepts of historically informed interpretation. However, the path of early music was not his first choice of study. He had originally applied to the conservatoire as a violinist, and it was only because he did not succeed at his audition that he ultimately began studying the recorder, and he became a master of the instrument. It was thanks to his study of the flute at the Civica Scuola di Musica that Antonini fully discovered the world of Baroque music. In addition, as he himself recalls, it was a great advantage that as a flautist specialising in historical interpretation, he did not have many artistic models to rely on and simply imitate (after all, in the 1980s the field was still in its infancy), so he had to seek out his own interpretive approaches. He found further support in his studies at the Centre de Musique Ancienne in Geneva, but the urge never abandoned him to penetrate truly deeply into the music and to create his own language, which is now so appreciated for its uniqueness.

In 1985 he founded his own Baroque ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, with which he still appears all around the world in the dual role of soloist (whether on the recorder or the Baroque transverse flute) and conductor. Overall, perhaps the most ambitious project he threw himself into a few years back with the Basel Chamber Orchestra was to record the complete symphonies of Haydn, and to finish by the year 2032, the 300th anniversary of the composer’s birth. The project Haydn2032, of which Antonini is the artistic director, is daring not only for its scope (Haydn wrote 107 Symphonies, so it is necessary to release 2 CDs with three or four symphonies every year!), but also because of the interpretive difficulties of Haydn’s music. “Haydn is very difficult to perform well because many of the interpretive paths can sound boring. But Haydn is not boring, it’s just the matter of finding the key to the correct interpretation”, explains Antonini. So far, 18 CDs have been issued, so the Haydn symphonic repertoire he has already recorded, rehearsed, or prepared has also influenced the programming of Antonini’s concerts in recent years.

Of course, Antonini does not overlook other greats masters of the 16th through the 18th centuries, whose works he has recorded with Il Giardino Armonico or performed in concert with such major orchestras as the Berlin Philharmonic, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra and with renowned soloists like Cecilia Bartoli, Giuliano Carmignola, Isabelle Faust, and Katia and Marielle Labèque. He also devotes himself to opera; in recent years, for example, we have been able to see him at Milan’s La Scala (Giulio Cesare), the Zurich Opera House (Idomeneo), and the Theater an der Wien (Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo). He is also the artistic director of the Polish music festival Wratislavia Cantans and the principal guest conductor of the Basel Chamber Orchestra.