Actor

After performing the previous night with the Czech Philharmonic on our grandest stage, the Prague Philharmonic Choir graces the intimate Zankel Hall with this powerful, all-Czech program in honor of the 100th Year of Czech Music celebration. The ensemble is one of the world’s leading champions of Czech choral music—a singular tradition—and in this concert, they perform vocal works by many of the nation’s most beloved composers: Eben, Janáček, Dvořák, Martinů, and Jan Novák.

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Prague Philharmonic Choir

Carnegie Hall

Meet one of opera’s most unforgettable characters, Katerina Ismailova, in the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s (BSO) concert performance of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The BSO’s remarkable history with Shostakovich’s music dates back to the composer’s lifetime, and in recent years has included multiple Grammy Award–winning recordings and season highlights at Carnegie Hall. Of his “intimate relationship with [Shostakovich’s] music,” Music Director and Conductor Andris Nelsons says, “I feel like I know him, in a mystical way.” There’s no better way to hear this music than with the BSO at Carnegie Hall.

Boston Symphony Orchestra

For all his reputation as a prickly artistic genius whose music crackles with heaven-storming power, Beethoven shared with his teacher Haydn a delightful musical wit, nowhere so clearly demonstrated as in his Eighth Symphony. The cycle concludes with his hugely ambitious and all-embracing Ninth, a revolution in and of itself; it was the first symphony to include chorus, transforming Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” into a rallying cry for humanity.

Andris Nelsons conducts Beethoven Symphonies 8 & 9

In Leoš Janáček’s opera, Kát’a Kabanová, the eponymous heroine is ensnared at the heart of an ominous mesh of relations. Her domineering mother-in-law, Kabanicha, oppresses and controls her son Tichon, whose marriage to Kát’a suffers massively from heteronomy. Because Kát’a finds no fulfilment in this family, she flees and fulfils her unsatisfied erotic desires in an affair with Boris. As composer and librettist, Janáček bundles the plot of the literary template, Alexander N. Ostrovsky’s drama, The Storm. The libretto largely dispenses with the portrayal of the external social circumstances, from whence Kát’a’s essence and choices are decisively determined. Instead, Janáček traces the development of the title character in a psychological-sensitive musical language. Kát’a’s feelings of guilt increase continuously until they discharge into a public confession as an emotional storm. The turbulent and in places fanciful music opens the space for passages of lyrical grace and allows us to experience the essence of the characters. In Kát’a, director Krzysztof Warlikowski sees an outsider, who is denied a life in harmony with her desires, and at the end prefers death over lies. The destructive power of religion behind it all is not only found in a small Russian town on the banks of the Volga in the 1860s, where the libretto places the plot, but rather can also be seen everywhere all over the world.

Pavel Černoch

Actor

Events

Upcoming events

23 - 25 Jan, 2025

Andris Nelsons conducts Beethoven Symphonies 8 & 9 · Boston Symphony Orchestra

Mar 17 - Jul 7, 2025

Káťa Kabanová · Bayerische Staatsoper

Past events

Dec 6, 2024

Prague Philharmonic Choir · Carnegie Hall

Jan 30, 2024

Boston Symphony Orchestra · Carnegie Hall

About

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