Prague Philharmonia with saxophonist Valentine Michaud will offer a May concert full of contrasts

The penultimate concert of the Prague Philharmonia’s orchestral subscription series offers the most diverse program of the entire series of nine concerts. On Saturday, May 11, in the Dvořák Hall Rudolfina, the orchestra will present itself with a program of music by the European greats Janáček, Martin, Milhaud and Schumann. Rising star Oscar Jockel will take the baton this time, and the soloist of the evening will be saxophonist Valentine Michaud, the first saxophonist ever to perform with the Vienna Philharmonic.

“We will start the whole concert surrounded by nature thanks to Janáček’s Suite for Strings, then we will progress to a completely different world – we will get lost in Martin’s polytonal ballad music with solo saxophone – and at the end of the first half Milhaud’s dance Scaramouche will come. In the second half of the concert, ‘Spring’ will be played, a symphony by Robert Schumann, which will bring us back to the original motif of nature.” the assistant to the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and recipient of the Herbert von Karajan award comments on the concert program Oscar Jockel.

For Oscar Jockel, music is a way to another universe in which a person gets lost, and paradoxically returns to himself through this loss. As a child, he suffered from a rare hearing defect, and it was music that helped him at that time. “I couldn’t communicate with words, so instead I sat down at the piano and with its help I tried to tell stories, or rather express my feelings about the events. But at the time it seemed completely normal and natural to me,” he remembers Jockel to their communication barriers.

The Prague Philharmonia will open the May concert with Leoš Janáček, whose compositional language with strong influences from the Moravian environment has matured into a truly extraordinary originality. Janáčkova Suite for Strings it was created as his very first orchestral work at the end of the 1870s — while the composer did not achieve his greatest fame until three decades later.

Also Symphony No. 1 in B flat major “Spring” by Robert Schumann is a work that foreshadows the great future of its genius author, one of the most important representatives of German romanticism.

At the center of the evening are two contrasting compositions for solo saxophone, performed by the talented Valentine Michaud. Wistful, melodic Ballad by the 20th century Swiss composer Frank Martin presents the saxophone as a sensitive and malleable instrument. Sparkling Scaramouche Daria Milhauda, ​​on the other hand, brings to the fore the virtuoso dimension of the saxophone.