The 78th edition of the Prague Spring Festival began this Friday in the Smetana Hall of the Municipal House with the participation of President Petr Pavel and Prime Minister Petr Fiala from the ODS. As is the tradition, Má vlast by Bedřich Smetana was performed, this time by the Orchestra of the Welsh National Opera under the baton of its chief conductor Tomáš Hanus.
A live concert transmitted station CT art, started at eight o’clock in the evening. Prime Minister Petr Fiala from ODS and his wife Jana Fialová participated in the ceremony for the second time. This time, however, the orchestra from Cardiff, after the arrival of the conductor Hanus, played a festive fanfare from the opera Libuše, during which the presidential couple Petr Pavel and the first lady Eva Pavlova also arrived in the box on the balcony. The national anthem followed. Only then did the harp from Vyšehrad sound, the first part of the cycle of symphonic poems Má vlast by Bedřich Smetana.
Attendance of the President at the opening Prague Spring used to be common in the times of Václav Havel and Václav Klaus. Their follower Miloš Zeman attended the prestigious social event with his wife only twice in ten years, specifically in 2013 and 2016.
This year’s elected president, Petr Pavel, came to the premiere of the new production of Our Furious at the National Theater in Prague at the beginning of March. However, since he was watching before the inauguration, he did not sit in the presidential box and his visit was not accompanied by proper ceremonies.
Friday’s opening concert of the Prague Spring was conducted by Tomáš Hanus, a 53-year-old native of Brno, one of Jiří Bělohlávek’s three internationally successful students. He is in his seventh year as artistic director of the Welsh National Opera in Cardiff. Although he is also a member of the Prague Spring artistic council, he last performed at this festival ten years ago with the French Ensemble intercontemporain. He considers My Homeland to be “a work of genius that was ahead of its time in some respects,” as he said in an interview with Aktuálně.cz.
The Welsh National Opera Orchestra is the fourth British ensemble to host the opening concert of the Prague Spring. In 2005 it was the London Symphony Orchestra with conductor Colin Davis, in 1999 they came with an informed historical interpretation by the London Classical Players with Roger Norrington and for the first time, exactly thirty years ago, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from Liverpool with conductor Libor Pešek.
Má vlast, a work of the late national revival, has been played at the Prague Spring since 1953. The tradition is refreshed by the fact that a different conductor takes over every year. Similar to Smetana’s opera Libuše, the composition is mainly reserved for festive occasions. It is a cycle of six symphonic poems inspired by the history, legends and landscape of Bohemia. The work was created between 1874 and 1879, the premiere took place in November 1882 in Prague’s Žofín.
Friday’s opening concert of the Prague Spring is repeated on Saturday. This year’s festival will include four dozen concerts, and it will end on June 2 with the Czech Philharmonic with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
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“The universal truth did not come, but people preferred it to populism,” Petr Pavel said about his election in the Spotlight program. | Video: Jakub Zuzánek, Aktuálně.cz
