A Tale of Two Cities

First and foremost, this long-term and ambitious partnership between Pentatone and the Czech Philharmonic reflects shared values. It is a celebration of an incredibly rich tradition, the word not being understood here as something stale or immobile, but rather devoid of any of the negative connotations sometimes born by it – exemplifying tradition in its truest, noblest sense: historical consciousness bringing about the recognition and continuity of what is good and has been transmitted. Furthermore, it is extraordinarily fortunate and beautifully symbolic that we have at the onset of this journey two conductors sharing the transmission duties, the orchestra’s current Music Director Semyon Bychkov on the one hand, and the most important Czech conductor to have emerged in this generation, Principal Guest Conductor Jakub Hr??a on the other, paving the way for other distinguished members of the Czech Philharmonic’s family of conductors further down the line.?

There are a handful of orchestras in the world whose sound culture, while firmly rooted in a particular realm of repertoire, transcends generations and shifting national boundaries – the Czech Philharmonic among them. When one thinks of this storied and revered ensemble, their extensive recorded legacy comes readily to mind, together with the names of An?erl, Kubelík, Neumann – and their association with the most prominent of Czech composers, Antonín Dvo?ák, is almost undistinguishable from the orchestra’s very foundation. Dvo?ák himself occupies a rather interesting and unique position in music history: ever the cosmopolitan artist, he fully absorbed the influences of the great Romantic symphonic canon of the 19th?century, while his music at the same time provides a mirror for a distinctive and truly idiomatic national character. Self-awareness and identity thus remain prerequisites for world-openness, or vice versa. That would seem an apt metaphor for this new collaboration between Pentatone and the orchestra. Considering Dvo?ák’s concertos and later symphonic output, we look forward to documenting performances that will no doubt become new references for our time. Then, if we take one step back and glimpse at the outer ends of the Dvo?ák constellation, both his illustrious predecessor Smetana and his son-in-law Suk form the obvious external panels of a glorious triptych, the former widely recorded (although?Má Vlast?will be an addition to our catalogue), the latter very much less so. It is nonetheless an essential example of our commitment to broadening and enriching our common recorded heritage.?

Gustav Mahler falls in a somewhat different category, yet he sets the frame, perhaps even the destination of the journey we are embarking on. One will find his works perhaps less immediately associated, in our collective psyche, with the Czech Philharmonic, but that is a kind of historical bias, brought about in great part by the division of Europe by the Iron Curtain in the 20th?century.??Encyclopaedias list Mahler as an Austro-Bohemian composer, after all, and indeed he was born in what is today the Czech Republic; grew up in a small town on the border of Moravia; had some of his early professional stations in Olomouc and Prague (although Vienna-trained), and conducted the very Czech Philharmonic in the world premiere performance of his Seventh Symphony at the Rudolfinum in 1908, by which point he was globally celebrated both as a conductor and as a composer – a homecoming of sorts. Anyone can agree that this is a connection of exceptional depth and organicity. This will be Pentatone’s first-ever full cycle of Mahler Symphonies, and several of them we will also be recording for the first time, while documenting the orchestra’s first cycle on record since their treasured survey of the corpus under Václav Neumann in the 1980s. This is a multi-fold tale of two cities: the Prague of Dvo?ák that is also the Prague of Mahler; or else Prague and New York, the evolving backdrop of the Czech National Revival and the bridge to modernity, the Old and the New World that both composers inhabited, if in very different, and still sometimes complementary manners.?It is quite significant and?illuminating?that the roughly 35-year span during which the music has been written corresponds to a time of vast economic and technological expansion, and yet relative stability and prosperity, in Europe as well as in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, very much in the spirit of Stefan Zweig and?Die Welt von Gestern, with Prague as a leading capital in Europe.?It is a vibrant testimony, ultimately, to profoundly humane and cosmopolitan ideals – European ideals. It is a time not so far remote from our own.?