Czech Philharmonic • Hamburg

“My little room is now furnished, pictures hanging: Sebastian Bach above the piano, next to him Beethoven, and then several Raphaels – the decoration of the walls is quite varied. I also have a dressing table, with a bottle of eau de cologne, which all my aunts and cousins so admire. And then a tiny basket containing my three travel journals,” thus wrote Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–1847) in 1832 after returning to Berlin from a two-year journey to England, Scotland and Italy. Having Bach and Beethoven portraits in his apartment attests to the young composer’s musical loves and idols, while reproductions of Raphael’s paintings served to recollect his impressions of Italy. Mendelssohn’s keen interest in the history of art was kindled within the intellectual milieu in which he grew up. He was born in Hamburg, yet when he was three his family moved to Berlin in fear of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army. His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, was a renowned philosopher, a leading cultural figure who played a considerable role in the emancipation of Jews in German society. Felix’s father, the banker and art lover Abraham Mendelssohn renounced Judaism and converted to Protestantism, and also formally adopted another surname, Bartholdy. A musician herself, Felix’s mother Lea eagerly supported and nurtured her children’s talent. Felix grew up in a family romantically enchanted by Nature, poetry and music. He began composing at the time when music was perceived as capable of telling stories, conveying ideas and rendering impressions. Fully embracing this approach, his extensive oeuvre includes 12 early string symphonies, as well as five mature symphonies for full orchestra, combining the historical legacy with the Romantic sentiment of his time. Although not programme works, they clearly reflect Mendelssohn’s personal experience.

The most noteworthy of the mature symphonies are the third, the “Scottish”, and the fourth, the “Italian”, both inspired by the composer’s youthful travels. Mendelssohn began conceiving Symphony No. 4 in A major, Op. 90, the “Italian”, during his almost two-year sojourn in Italy, starting in May 1830. Carrying with him the travel diaries of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who travelled through the country between 1786 and 1788, he visited Rome, Naples, Pompeii, Genoa, Milan, Venice, Florence and other places. In a letter to his sister Fanny, dated 22 February 1831, Mendelssohn wrote that he had been composing intensively, completing the cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The First Walpurgis Night), based on Goethe’s eponymous poem, adding that: “The Italian symphony is making great progress. It will be the most joyous piece I have ever done, the final movement in particular. I have not found anything for the adagio yet, and I think that I will save that for Naples.” He also pointed out: “Yet I still cannot get a grip on the Scottish symphony. Should during this time a good idea occur, I will snatch it, note it down presently and finish it.” Mendelssohn gave a secondary name to both symphonies. Completed in 1833, the Italian was performed on 13 May that year in London by the London Philharmonic Society, with the composer conducting. Not entirely satisfied with the work, Mendelssohn made revisions, yet he deemed none of them definitive, and so the piece exists in several versions. Chronologically, the Italian is actually his third symphony, as the composer only finished the Scottish in 1842, when it also received its premiere. The Italian was first published, posthumously, in 1851, thus having a higher number.

The first movement, in sonata form, reveals Mendelssohn as an innovator of the conventional conception. As against the bold main theme, the subsidiary theme is rather a mere episode, yet the development includes a third, contrapuntal, theme, attesting to the composer’s admiration of the Baroque masters. Created in response to the death of Mendelssohn’s teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832), as well as his beloved J. W. Goethe (1749–1832), the second movement too can be considered to be in sonata form, albeit without a development. The third movement is a minuet, while the finale incorporates the vivacious Saltarello, an Italian folk dance in 6/8 time.

The ballet Pulcinella by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) from 1919–1920 is a post-war work of an entirely different kind. Unlike many other compositions reacting to the First World War, Pulcinella does not resort to pathos, grieving, or expressive gestures. Stravinsky was reacting to the post-war situation indirectly by moving away from emotional immediacy and consciously returning to the music of the past. The resulting composition is one of the most original musical reactions to the end of the war, and it ushers in a new creative period in Stravinsky’s career, now known as Neoclassicism.

The stimulus for the ballet’s creation came from Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, with whom Stravinsky had already been collaborating before the war. The results of their partnership, which began in 1909, included The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring—works that radically transformed both modern music and ballet. After the war, however, the ballet

company was facing financial and organisational difficulties, and Diaghilev was looking for a new artistic direction, so in 1919 he showed Stravinsky musical sources from the early 18th century that were attributed at the time to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, and he proposed using them for a ballet based on the character Pulcinella, a traditional figure of the Italian commedia dell’arte. Stravinsky’s initial reaction was cautious; he was hesitant to engage in the mere arranging of old music. It was only after he had studied the material in more detail that he realised he could use the music of the past as the basis for a new compositional process. He retained the melodic outlines, bass lines, and formal models, but he transformed the rhythms, harmonies, and orchestration. Instead of a return to the Baroque, the result is a dialogue with the past, where the old and new continually collide.

The Ballets Russes gave the premiere of Pulcinella on 15 May 1920 at the Paris Opera with Ernest Ansermet conducting, choreography by Léonide Massine, and stage design by Pablo Picasso, whose cubistically stylised costumes and sets made a strong contribution to the work’s overall aesthetics. Stravinsky later characterised this collaboration with his usual detachment: “Picasso accepted the commission to design the décors for the same reason that I agreed to arrange the music—for the fun of it.”

The ballet’s simple, episodic scenario is based on situations typical of the commedia dell’arte—mistaken identity, jealousy, feigned death, and a final reconciliation. Rather than a psychological drama, we have a stylised play with masked characters. Musically, Stravinsky conceived the ballet for singers and instruments, with three vocal soloists (soprano, tenor, and bass) singing Italian texts borrowed from period sources and making conscious reference to musical practice of the 18th century, when the boundaries between ballet, opera, and cantata were often blurred. The transparency of the modest orchestral forces employed here contrasts deliberately with the monumental sound of Stravinsky’s pre-war ballets and of the Rite of Spring in particular. The 21 brief, self-contained numbers create a linked sequence of contrasting dance and vocal scenes. Besides the short concert suite that Stravinsky himself fashioned from the ballet in 1922 and that is often played separately, the complete ballet music is also sometimes performed without staged action, and that version will be heard today.

At the time, the reception of Pulcinella differed vastly from the tempestuous reaction to The Rite of Spring: instead of a scandal, the new ballet provoked intellectual discussion about originality, authorship, and attitudes towards the music of the past. Stravinsky later commented on the importance of Pulcinella with detachment: “Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course—the first of many love affairs in that direction—but it was a look in the mirror, too.” In this sense, Pulcinella is the post-war work par excellence—not an evocation of wartime experiences, but rather a light-hearted, ironic, and yet decisive turn that profoundly shaped the course of 20th-century music.

The German mezzo-soprano Stefanie Irányi is probably best known to Prague audiences for her appearances with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra. By performing songs by Zemlinsky and other composers and by appearing in Wagner’s Die Walküre, she has revealed to the Czech capital a sample of the breadth of her repertoire, ranging from the High Baroque and Classical eras (as shown by her debut album Lamenti with excerpts from operas by J. A. Hasse, J. Haydn and G. F. Handel) to the present. She began her operatic career while still studying at the Musikhochschule in Munich (The Consul by Gian Carlo Menotti at the Royal Opera in Turin). She then began receiving more offers from European opera houses, enjoying perhaps her greatest success as Brangäne in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. She has also sung in concert performances of Wagner, for example as Fricka in Das Rheingold with the conductor Kent Nagano or as Sieglinde with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. She has also collaborated with such conductors as Zubin Mehta, Manfred Honeck, Sir Simon Rattle, and Jakub Hrůša. She also appears in recitals, usually with the pianist Helmut Deutsch.

The American tenor Eric Finbarr Carey, critically acclaimed for his “silken voice” (Opera News), is one of the most outstanding talents of the rising generation of singers. His lyric tenor voice has shined on American stages including Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera, but the current 2025/2026 season represents his breakthrough on the European scene. Last year’s victory at the Clermont-Auvergne Opéra International Vocal Competition contributed to him making his debut at the Opéra de Limoges in a new production of Handel’s Messiah, and he toured Europe with the Czech Philharmonic in Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, appearing at such prestigious venues as Vienna’s Konzerthaus and Milan’s La Scala. His other successes include a prize at the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition (2023). In the operatic repertoire, Carey has excelled in the title role of Britten’s Albert Herring and as Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky’s opera A Rake’s Progress. As a concert artist, he specialises in the music of G. F. Handel and J. S. Bach, in particular in the role of the Evangelist in the St John Passion. He studied at the Peabody Institute, Bard College, and Boston University.

The South Korean bass Jongmin Park, a laureate of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition and of the Tchaikovsky Competition, graduated from the Korea National University of Arts, then he became a member of the Accademia Teatro alla Scala in Milan. From 2010 to 2013 he was an ensemble member with the Hamburg State Opera, then for seven years with the Vienna State Opera. During those engagements, he learned many title roles in repertoire ranging from Mozart to Wagner and Puccini, which he has also sung, for example, at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, Madrid’s Teatro Real, and the festivals in Bayreuth and Salzburg. In addition, he makes guest appearances at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and London’s Covent Garden. The concert repertoire has taken him to Europe (Vienna’s Musikverein, London’s Wigmore Hall, and Berlin’s Philharmonie) and even as far as Suntory Hall in Tokyo, for example. He has already collaborated with the Czech Philharmonic on a recording of Dvořák’s Stabat Mater made in 2016 under the baton of Jiří Bělohlávek.