Jakub Hrůša and Julia Fischer

Vítězslava Kaprálová was a highly gifted musician who died in 1940 at the age of only 25, presumably from typhoid fever. The daughter of Janáček’s master student Václav Kaprál, she trained at the conservatory in Prague before moving to Paris on a scholarship to study under Bohuslav Martinů, among others. Despite her short life, Kaprálová composed around fifty works. Her Military Sinfonietta caused a sensation at the 16th Festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music in London in 1938, after which the composer was commissioned by Universal Edition to write the Suita rustica. The result is a tribute to Czech traditional music, in which a captivating furiant pays homage to the great national composer Bedřich Smetana.

Almost 40 years before the Suita rustica, Josef Suk wrote his Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra, which was to become one of his most popular pieces. The composer, himself an outstanding violinist of his time, wrote a work of concert-like virtuosity, paired with a character that shifts between restlessness and tangible drama – possibly as an expression of Suk’s dark premonition: his wife Otilie – the daughter of Antonín Dvořák – had heart disease and would soon die.

Bohuslav Martinů’s First Symphony, on the other hand, was written in memory of Nathalie Koussevitzky, the wife of conductor and patron Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned the work. She died in 1942. It is a spellbinding piece of music of epic dimensions, whose basic character is primarily lyrical despite its motoric rhythms and dramatic outbursts. “I have tried,” said Martinů, “to elicit a harmonious sound from the orchestra despite the polyphonic approach contained in the score.”

Berliner Philharmoniker

Jakub Hrůša

Julia Fischer