Janine Jansen

Jakub Hrůša calls performing the music of Josef Suk his perennial passion and a pleasurable duty. In the 2026/2027 season with the Czech Philharmonic, he finishes the long-term project of recording Suk’s complete orchestral works with his Dramatic Overture. In search of contrast, the conductor will open the concert with that work.
Beethoven’s Violin Concerto opened the second half of a concert on the day before Christmas Eve in 1806 at the Theater an der Wien. Because the work was finished at the last moment, the violin virtuoso Franz Clement supposedly had to play it without having prepared properly, but after the premiere, a critic wrote about the “energy and sureness with which the soloist made the instrument into his slave”. Nonetheless, only long after its composer’s death did the concerto found popularity, following an 1844 performance by the 12-year-old violinist Joseph Joachim with Beethoven’s admirer Felix Mendelssohn conducting.

Martin Smolka’s Melancholy Sits and Looks Elsewhere brings us to the present. He says that music is a “clumsy, miserable narrator of extramusical content”, and that a composer “lacks any proof that the music contains the meanings mentioned in the title”, yet Smolka does not give up on using textual components. On the basis of a libretto by Jaroslav Dušek, he composed Nagano, an opera in three periods and an overtime about the Czech national ice hockey team’s historic Olympic victory, and he has written other operas based on motifs from a fairy tale by Jan Werich or as a tribute to Umberto Eco; programme notes are one of his favourite genres. He has even written a poem about his creative processes, and we sill use it to invite listeners to a concert featuring a diverse programme ending with Richard Strauss:

How to Place Tones
Here and there a tone
here and there a ton of tones
here and there a tone
here and there a ton of tones
here and there a thinner tone
here and there a thicker tone
here and there
there and here
music 
with tones

Programme

Josef Suk
Dramatic Overture, Op. 4

Ludwig van Beethoven
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61

Martin Smolka
Melancholia is Sitting and Looking Elsewhere  (world premiere, commissioned by the Czech Philharmonic)

Richard Strauss
Der Rosenkavalier, suite from the opera, Op. 59

Performers

Janine Jansen violin

Jakub Hrůša conductor
Czech Philharmonic