Rozhlasový podzim - Český rozhlas

12| 10| Út 19.30| Rudolfinum – Dvořákova síň
12| 10| Tue 7.30 pm| Rudolfinum – Dvořák Hall
position was individually influenced by an extramusical idea, which the composer wanted to express.
However, Liszt was not only the “inventor“ of a new style. As a brilliant pianist he created many new
stylization techniques for piano playing and he looked for and found new ways in the areas of harmony
and instrumentation as well. Liszt was also a generous benefactor. His house in Weimar was where
the elite European composers met and Ferenc Liszt selflessly supported many of them. His numerous
piano transcriptions of his contemporaries’ works could also be regarded as the same selfless help to
his composer colleagues. In the time of non-existent media and recording technology, these transcriptions
contributed widely to the spread of the then latest orchestral music. The period of the oncoming
Romanticism was also the time of the national awakening for many European countries. Although
Ferenc Liszt was, in fact, not of Hungarian origin and did not speak Hungarian, he paid tribute to his
native country in a lot of his compositions. One of them was the set of Hungarian Rhapsodies, which
are loose fantasy works influenced by Hungarian – especially gypsy – folklore and are mostly divided
into two sections – slow (called lassan) and fast (called friska). The most famous is Rhapsody No. 2 in
C sharp Minor. Due to its popularity, orchestral arrangements as well as popular versions of this composition
have been made.
Fryderyk Chopin (1810–1849), whose important anniversary we are celebrating this year, was a
great innovator in many areas of the musical language. Unlike the showy and a little superficial Liszt,
Chopin is intimate: His innovations of piano stylization are rather minute and his new harmonic progressions
are sometimes almost unrecognizable as they are concealed within the ingenious network of
his music. While he was still living in Warsaw, which he left forever at the age of twenty-one, Chopin
wrote two piano concertos. Due to their first editions, the first one is now referred to as the second
piano concerto. It is full of original creativity, poetry and especially references to the Polish folklore.
Here, Chopin’s patriotism meets Liszt’s efforts.
Béla Bartók (1881–1945) looked for real Hungarian folk music by collecting songs in the country.
However, unlike Liszt, he did not confuse it with the music of the gypsy communities. Like the Hungarian
language, Hungarian folklore is, analogically, totally different from Central European folklore and
Bartók – besides following the main streams of European music – allowed it to permeate the whole
of his musical language. His Dance Suite celebrated the 50th anniversary of the merger between the
cities of Buda and Pest in 1923. In this composition, which is one of Bartók’s most famous works, we
can also hear references to other nations’ folk music. Monothematic ritornellos, which divide the work
clearly, are inserted between its individual parts.
The choreographic poem La Valse by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was also inspired by dance rhythms.
Ravel’s composition, written at about the same time as Bartók’s Dance Suite, is a waltz. At the time
when Europe was beginning to be heavily influenced by Latin American dances, Ravel wrote a bit of a
sentimentally retrospective and, in terms of sound, a dazzling fantasy celebrating the famous European
dance, whose glory was – at the time of the creation of the piece – already fading. Some of Ravel’s
interpreters also see in this work a reflection of the composer’s feeling about all the things destroyed
by WW I.
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