Leoš Janáček (arr. D. Matoušek)
The Diary of One Who Disappeared

Alban Berg
Seven Early Songs

Karol Szymanowski
Symphony No. 1, Op. 15

Magdalena Kožená – mezzo-soprano
tenor TBC
Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava
Daniel Raiskin – Chief Conductor of JPO

The closing concert of the season is part of the Leoš Janáček International Music Festival.

In The Diary of One Who Disappeared, Leoš Janáček created one of the most original song cycles of the 20th century. The story of a young man’s love for the Romani girl Zefka, for whom he abandons his home and former life, first caught the composer’s attention in 1916 in the newspaper Lidové noviny. He was also inspired by Kamila Stösslová, his muse in his later years. Janáček revised the work several times between 1917 and 1923. It will now be heard in the premiere of an orchestral arrangement by the tenor Daniel Matoušek.

Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs, composed between 1905 and 1908 during his studies with Arnold Schoenberg, stand on the threshold of his later radical turn toward atonality and twelve-tone technique. They still remain, however, under the influence of the German Lied tradition. The love poems by German writers, combined with Berg’s music, lend the work that elusive, intoxicating atmosphere characteristic of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Karol Szymanowski described his First Symphony (1906–1907) as a “contrapuntal-harmonic-orchestral monster” and, after its premiere in Warsaw in 1909, rejected the work entirely. Only after Szymanowski’s death was it revived in 1938 by the conductor of the original premiere, Grzegorz Fitelberg. Alongside strong influences of Max Reger and Richard Strauss, the symphony still impresses today with its striking immediacy of invention and exceptional instinct for drama and orchestration.