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Premiere of Glanert’s Prager Sinfonie

Some composers are born storytellers! Semyon Bychkov is conducting an atmospheric concert featuring Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony, preceded by the Dutch premiere of the Prager Sinfonie by Detlev Glanert, the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s former resident composer. The work comprises sung texts by Franz Kafka evoking the wistful atmosphere of Prague 100 years ago.
Detlev Glanert is attending a rehearsal with the Concertgebouw Orchestra'. image: Renske Vrolijk/Concertgebouworkest
Detlev Glanert is attending a rehearsal with the Concertgebouw Orchestra'. image: Renske Vrolijk/Concertgebouworkest

Storyteller

Detlev Glanert can tell a story in music like no other. So it’s no coincidence that he’s often thought of first and foremost as a composer of opera. But his output also includes many large-scale orchestral works – all bright, compelling symphonic narratives. Glanert wrote many of these works from 2011 to 2017 while serving as the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s resident composer.

Franz Kafka as a source of inspiration

The orchestra has frequently performed music by the German composer in recent years as well. Now Semyon Bychkov is leading the Dutch premiere of Glanert’s Prager Sinfonie (Symphony No. 4), in which he draws inspiration from Prague, where the work was given its world premiere last December, and from the way in which Franz Kafka (b. 1883, d. 1924) portrays the city.

Both the music and Kafka’s texts are imbued with a ‘melancholy atmosphere of evening’, as Glanert puts it, ‘as well as a subtle but constant unease’.

Kafka may have once said that Prague is a mother who never releases one from her clutches. We can also hear this ‘strange appeal’ and constant reminder of the past in the music and in the profound text fragments, sung by mezzo-soprano Tanja Ariane Baumgartner and bass Christian Immler. Always with one foot in the present and the other in Romanticism, Glanert cites Mahler and Zemlinsky among his musical influences.

Detlev Glanert tijdens het applaus voor het Requiem na de uitvoering van Requiem voor Jheronimus Bosch in het Concertgebouw Amsterdam (foto: Renske Vrolijk)
Detlev Glanert after the performance of his Requiem for Jheronimus Bosch in the Concertgebouw Amsterdam (photo: Renske Vrolijk)

Just as impressions of Prague form the basis for Glanert’s Prager Sinfonie, so did impressions of a journey to Scotland find their way into Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3, itself also a strongly evocative and melancholy work forming a single whole, with no breaks between the movements. The initial impetus for the ‘Scottish’ Symphony was an evening visit Mendelssohn paid to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, ‘where Queen Mary [Mary Queen of Scots] once lived and loved’. The ruins of the abbey church particularly captured the young Mendelssohn’s imagination. ‘Everything there is ruined, decayed and open to the clear sky,’ he wrote in a letter to his sister Fanny. ‘I believe I found the inspiration for the opening of my Scottish Symphony there today.’ He even included the notes of a theme in the letter.

Upon returning home, Mendelssohn found it difficult to return to the ‘Scottish mists’. Thirteen years later, he would finally lead the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig in the premiere of the symphony, having by that time served for many years as its chief conductor.