Elgarův koncert & Enigma (O)

German conductor Axel Kober has held leading positions in opera houses in Schwerin, Dortmund, Mannheim, Leipzig and Deutsche Oper am Rhein. He also conducted at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. However, in order to demonstrate his supposed versatility, he will bring scores of Czech and British music to Prague. After Josef Suk's Dramatic Overture, the graduation work with which the future great composer and also second player of the Czech Quartet completed his composition studies with Antonín Dvořák at the Prague Conservatory in 1892, two of Edward Elgar's most famous compositions will be heard. A late romantic, a self-taught composer, an outsider by default, he lived mostly outside the metropolis, supported only by his wife's confidence in the power of talent. He was eventually made famous by the Enigma Variations. Their heroically melancholic style is based on a musical characteristic, it is supposed to be an image of friends. The first variation could be the composer's wife Alice, the last fourteenth variation, the grand symphonic finale, could embody the author himself, already having sufficient creative self-confidence. The Cello Concerto is definitely Elgar's next most popular composition. It was created in 1919 at a summer apartment in Sussex on the south coast of England, where even during the holidays a year earlier, the noise of war could be heard across the English Channel at night. It has an intense depth and nostalgia and certainly sadness over the war ravaged Europe. The hidden beauty of the composition was finally revealed to the audience only in the 1970s by cellist Jacqueline du Pré.

Program:

• Josef Suk: Dramatic Overture Op. 4
• Edward Elgar: Cello Concerto
• Edward Elgar: Enigma, Variations on Own Theme Op. 36