Nurturing the culture

This is a short post about unculturally cultural five days in Prague on a break of summer. I flew back to Prague on Friday (May 21) to satisfy my thirst for classical music and to attend at least some of the concerts of Prague Spring me and my brother bought tickets for. Basically out of the eight concerts I originally intended to see I managed to attend only four but luckily for me at least two of them were THE Concerts.

On Friday we had pleasure to listen to conductor / piano soloist Mr. Perahia and The Academy of St Martin in the Fields. As a typical uneducated eastern Slovak, I was so tired my head dropped every few seconds and I almost fell asleep during the best part of the performance (Concert for piano and orchestra in C moll, KV 491).

After nurturing (or torturing) our sight sense by attending screening of new Ridley Scott / Russel Crowe vehicle – Robin Hood (incomparably worse than good old Gladiator) we attended concert of Bayerische Rundfunk Orchestra (‘BRO’) which is according to some, one of the best ensembles in the world. Although half of the audience preferred to watch Hockey World Championships final game (congrats to Czech Republic as it won gold) this was a concert of the concerts. Mahler’s Kindertoddliche Liede were nice although not-understood appetizer for main course of Schubert’s Great symphony (No. 9 but depends on who is doing the numbering). BRO can claim that they awaken Schubert’s appreciation in me. Their rendition of his grandest symphony was pure pleasure and received standing ovation of a half empty Obecni dum.

On Monday we continued to broaden our horizons (in my brother’s words – ‘self-educate’) and attended Prague chamber orchestra performance. Out of the four concerts we attended, it was the most uninteresting (if someone like can say something like this) but still important piece of puzzle of overall Prague Spring 2010 experience. Last but most definitely the first concert among those I attended had almost everything - charismatic conductor, full count orchestra, world premier, exceptional soloist and many other attributes I do not know about. State Philharmonic from Kosice performed in a Czech premier concert for giora and orchestra of Peter Breiner (who was also conducting). What a pleasure! What a joy! The concert was so good and so much enjoyed by performers (ensemble, conductor and soloist), audience and everyone else that it received standing ovation.

Wonderfully played by a by-far the youngest orchestra we have seen this year it handily overcome performances of Mr. Gardiner and Czech Philharmonic Orchestra (as described in previous posts) or BRO. It should be duly noted that I am biased Kosice-born observer :) Second half composed of short Mozart’s concert and another masterpiece of Jean Sibelius (a selection from Kuningas Kristian II) performed by Kosice orchestra.

It appears that those culturally overdosed days in Prague had to leave some impression on me as I am writing this post just before boarding plane to Prague and c. one month after the above mentioned happened. Or maybe it’s just me trying to present myself as a intellectually deep person. In this case please take my post with huge pile of salt as it is well known that there are no intellectuals born in eastern Slovakia :)