The menacingly beautiful story of Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin, the festival premiere of Luboš Fišer’s Violin Concerto, and the big return of Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Jakub Hrůša, the new Music Director of the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden, Chief Conductor of the Bamberg Symphony and, from the 2028–2029 season, also Chief Conductor and Music Director of the Czech Philharmonic, will join forces with the Czech Philharmonic at the Prague Spring to present rousing music by Béla Bartók, Leoš Janáček and a classic of the Czech music scene from the latter half of the 20th century, Luboš Fišer. Returning to the festival alongside him is Artist-in-Residence of the Prague Spring 2025, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja who, in addition to Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra No. 2 by one of her favourites, Béla Bartók, will give the Prague Spring premiere of Fišer’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. “Patricia and I have already teamed up to perform works by Bartók, Beethoven, Stravinsky and Francesconi, but we’ll be discovering Luboš Fišer together for the first time,” admits Jakub Hrůša. These two superb artists have met up in the recent past to collaborate with the New York Philharmonic, the Bamberg Symphony and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

“Undeniably, Bartók and Janáček are two of my favourite composers,” Hrůša tells us. “Both were fundamentally aware of the strength that lies in the authenticity of the folk music of their native countries, yet each treated it in their own special way. The older Janáček with the artistic heart of a romantic, catapulted by his radical thinking into the modernist world of much younger composers, one of whom was Bartók; and then Bartók himself, who appeals to the listeners’ emotions with the same urgency, even though he had a more sober disposition with a more rational approach to constructivist principles. His Miraculous Mandarin, like Janáček’s Fate, has a startling way of drawing the audience out of their comfort zone. These are daring, surprising and very dynamic works,” he adds.