A conductor recommends: Jakub Hrůša’s highlights
Music from Bach to Berg is brought together from our archives in the playlist that Jakub Hrůša has compiled to mark his guest conducting appearance in September 2021. In addition to symphonies by Beethoven and Bruckner, his recommendations include works inspired by images and stories. Among the conductors is Hrůša’s teacher and fellow countryman Jiří Bělohlávek, plus Kirill Petrenko, Daniel Barenboim, Claudio Abbado, and Lorin Maazel.
Jakub Hrůša, chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony, thrilled audiences at his first performances with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2018 and 2019 with tone poems by Dvořák, Bartók, Berlioz and Janáček. In the process, he proved to be a keen storyteller with a distinctive sense of musical dramaturgy. The playlist that the Czech compiled from our concert archive to mark his third guest conducting appearance with the Philharmoniker also features symphonic poems: Daniel Barenboim conducts Richard Strauss’s capricious Till Eulenspiegel and Claudio Abbado conducts Claude Debussy’s sonorous La Mer. Narrative music drama is also the common thread in the suite from Janáček’s opera From the House of the Dead, here arranged by Hrůša’s teacher Jiří Bělohlávek, Wagner’s Ring without Words as performed by Lorin Maazel, and the St Matthew Passion staged by Peter Sellars and conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.
From the core symphonic repertoire, Hrůša has chosen Beethoven’s rhythmically energetic Seventh with Kirill Petrenko, which finds a counterpart in Bruckner’s expansive and song-like Seventh in Sergiu Celibidache’s interpretation. The playlist also includes Kirill Petrenko’s performance of Josef Suk’s Asrael Symphony. The Czech composer wrote this haunting work while in deep mourning: his father-in-law Antonín Dvořák and his daughter, Suk’s wife Ottilie, had died within a few months of each other.
This selection is complemented by two major concertos: Krystian Zimmerman can be heard in Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, and Frank Peter Zimmermann in Alban Berg’s violin concerto dedicated “To the memory of an angel”.
Our recommendations
- 15 years of the Digital Concert Hall: Highlights from members of the Berliner Philharmoniker
- A soprano’s perspective: Marlis Petersen’s favourites
- Notturno – music of the night with the Berliner Philharmoniker
- Gustav Mahler in his works
- Musical Sunrises: “Let there be light!”
- English music with the Berliner Philharmoniker