The final concert of the series will feature Chabrier’s Suite pastorale and Veprik’s Pastorale, filled with melancholy. The highlight of the evening will be Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2, performed by internationally acclaimed pianist Lukáš Vondráček, a native of Opava.

Emmanuel Chabrier
Suite pastorale

Alexander Veprik
Pastorale

Johannes Brahms
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in B-flat major

Lukáš Vondráček – piano
Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava
Christoph Mathias Mueller – conductor

The music of Emmanuel Chabrier reflects the artistic world of 19th-century Paris. He collaborated with poet Paul Verlaine, befriended painter Édouard Manet, and influenced composers such as Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky. His Suite pastorale is an orchestral arrangement of his piano pieces Pièces pittoresques, which César Franck admiringly compared to the music of Couperin and Rameau after their premiere in 1881.

Rural life and a close bond with nature are captured in Pastorale by Russian-Jewish composer Alexander Veprik, written in 1946. However, its melancholy tones seem to foreshadow the composer’s tragic fate — four years spent in a Soviet gulag.

Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, composed between 1878 and 1881, is among his most celebrated and frequently performed works. Before its premiere, Brahms, with typical dry humor, described it as “some tiny piano pieces,” but in truth, the concerto stands as one of the grandest and most expansive romantic works.

The demanding solo part will be performed by internationally renowned pianist and Opava native Lukáš Vondráček, a traditional soloist of the Opava cycle.