Czech Philharmonic • Seong-Jin Cho
Standing before the Prague Philharmonic Choir is Simon Halsey. Besides being one of today’s most distinguished choral conductors, he can also boast of having been a personal acquaintance of Benjamin Britten—the composer of the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. In the middle of the concert, Seong-Jin Cho will take a seat at the piano in Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody.
Programme
Benjamin Britten
The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (Variations and Fugue on Theme of Purcell), Op. 34
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43
Sergei Rachmaninoff
The Bells, a choral symphony for soloists, mixed choir, and orchestra, Op. 35
Performers
TBC narrator
Seong-Jin Cho
piano
With an innate musicality and overwhelming talent, Seong-Jin Cho has established himself worldwide as one of the leading pianists of his generation and most distinctive artists on the current music scene. His thoughtful and poetic, assertive and tender, virtuosic and colourful playing can combine panache with purity and is driven by an impressive natural sense of balance.
Seong-Jin Cho was brought to the world’s attention in 2015 when he won First Prize at the Chopin International Competition in Warsaw, and his career has rapidly ascended since. In January 2016, he signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon. An artist high in demand, Cho works with the world's most prestigious orchestras including Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker, London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, New York Philharmonic and The Philadelphia Orchestra. Conductors he regularly collaborates with include Myung-Whun Chung, Gustavo Dudamel, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Andris Nelsons, Gianandrea Noseda, Sir Simon Rattle, Santtu Matias Rouvali and Esa-Pekka Salonen.
An active recitalist very much in demand, Seong-Jin Cho performs in many of the world’s most prestigious concert halls. During the coming season he is engaged to perform solo recitals at the likes of Carnegie Hall, Boston Celebrity Series, Walt Disney Hall, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Liederhalle Stuttgart, at Laeiszhalle Hamburg, Berliner Philharmonie, Musikverein Wien and he debuts in recital at the Barbican London.
Seong-Jin Cho’s recordings have garnered impressive critical acclaim worldwide. The most recent one is of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Scherzi with the London Symphony Orchestra and Gianandrea Noseda, having previously recorded Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 as well as the Four Ballades with the same orchestra and conductor. His latest solo album titled The Wanderer was released in May 2020.
Born in 1994 in Seoul, Seong-Jin Cho started learning the piano at the age of six and gave his first public recital aged 11. In 2009, he became the youngest-ever winner of Japan’s Hamamatsu International Piano Competition. In 2011, he won Third Prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at the age of 17. From 2012–2015 he studied with Michel Béroff at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris. Seong-Jin Cho is now based in Berlin.
Kristina Mkhitaryan soprano
Pavel Černoch
tenor
Talent, industriousness, and an intelligent vocal approach have made Pavel Černoch one of today’s most respected and sought-after tenors. Critics highlight the silky tenderness and malleability of his voice and praise his acting talent, thanks to which he has convincingly portrayed such complex operatic characters as Janáček’s Laca, the Prince in Rusalka, and Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca.
His portrayals of roles mainly from the 19th and early 20th centuries have already been heard, for example, at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the Opéra national in Paris, London’s Covent Garden, and Madrid’s Teatro Real; he has also performed at the BBC Proms and festivals in Bregenz, Salzburg, and Glyndebourne. He has appeared on stage with Sir Simon Rattle in performances including a production of Káťa Kabanová in Berlin
A graduate of the music management programme at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno, he also went abroad to pursue his dream of becoming a singer. At the very beginning of his vocal career, he met the teacher Paolo De Napoli, who became his life-long mentor. His path to fame is recorded in the Czech Television documentary Pavel Černoch – Enfant terrible?
Aleksei Isaev bass
Prague Philharmonic Choir
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.
Simon Halsey choirmaster
Semyon Bychkov conductor
Czech Philharmonic
Student Programme
Dates and tickets
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Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
– Edgar Allan Poe: The Bells
In December 1906, when Sergei Rachmaninoff turned to his friend Nikita Morozov in search of literary material for a choral work, he came away empty handed, but while visiting Rome in early 1907, he received an anonymous letter with remarkable contents—a Russian translation of Poe’s poem The Bells. Besides urging him to read the poem, the letter also pointed out that the material was highly appropriate for a musical setting. Rachmaninoff arrived at the same conclusion:
“All my life I have taken pleasure in the differing moods and music of gladly chiming and mournfully tolling bells… In the drowsy quiet of a Roman afternoon, with Poe’s verses before me, I heard the bell voices, and tried to set down on paper their lovely tones that seemed to express the varying shades of human experience.” The effort proved worthwhile. In 1913, Rachmaninoff conducted the premiere of his choral symphony The Bells in Saint Petersburg.
Performing The Bells at the Rudolfinum are the Prague Philharmonic Choir led by Simon Halsey, who collaborated with the Czech Philharmonic during the 2025/2026 season on Dallapiccola’s opera Il prigioniero. “So there was no escape for me”, he says about his career, following the footsteps of his father, a choirmaster, and his mother, a conducting teacher. His father had worked closely with Benjamin Britten, so as a boy, Halsey saw the composer every summer at the festival on England’s east coast, where Britten premiered most of his works. The artistic director of the King’s College Choir, Cambridge, which Halsey attended, was also a close friend of Britten and the college’s principal pianist and organist — and so young Simon even sang at a memorial service honouring the composer’s memory.
According to him, Britten’s music stirs the intellect just as strongly as it moves the heart. The choirmaster of the Oslo Philharmonic adds that he feels strongly connected to Britten.