Music preview: Annely Peebo with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra

One of the brightest East European stars of vocal music, Estonian mezzo-soprano Annely Peebo, is coming to Prague for a concert with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of National Theater Music Director Tomáš Netopil.

Peebo has been called the Madonna of opera, due to her beauty and her energetic stage presence. She is an ensemble member of the Vienna State Opera, where she regularly performs both classic and contemporary programs, including, recently, Cosi fan Tutte at the Opéra de Nancy and the leading role in Carmen at the Volksoper Wien.

She has also become something of a crossover success, with a starring role in the French film Les lecons des ténebres and a stint hosting the Eurovision Song Contest in 2002. In Prague, she will perform Six Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, which features poems by arguably the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Shostakovich composed this suite in 1973, just two years before his death. As such, it represents his melodious, emotional late style. These songs are particularly significant in Shostakovich's oeuvre, as such shorter works and pieces of chamber music allowed the composer to express himself more completely and openly than he could in larger-scale works such as symphonies, in which he was expected by the communist regime to represent the strength and glory of Mother Russia. These are soulful, melancholy pieces that nevertheless give off the feeling of hard-won strength that seems to resonate both from Tsvetaeva's words and Shostakovich's music.  

The second piece of music on the program, Luboš Fišer's Fifteen Prints after Dürer's Apocalypse, is, like Shostakovich's songs based on Tsvetaeva's poems, a composition taking inspiration from a source beyond music. Fišer was a Prague-based composer of deceptively simple music. Fifteen Prints after Dürer's Apocalypse, composed in 1965, was one of his earliest pieces.

Brahms' Symphony No. 1 will round out this sumptuous program. Brahms completed this symphony in 1876, after more than two decades of composition and revision. While Brahms was a fastidious craftsman, the delayed completion of the symphony - even as he composed and premiered other well-received pieces such as his Piano Concerto No. 1 - was due primarily to the pressure he felt after Robert Schumann declared him the successor to Beethoven in an 1853 essay. Thus while critics and conductors anxiously awaited the symphony, Brahms demurred, making changes right up until the premiere.

Critics of the symphony have taken issue with Brahms' relationship with Beethoven, especially in the symphony's finale, when strands of melody from Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 become increasingly apparent. Some critics even went so far as to call the piece Beethoven's Symphony No. 10. Such criticism is unfounded, however, as Brahms' composition, while owing a debt both to Beethoven and to Bach, is more a synthesis of both figures than an aping of either.

This combination of Netopil, an energetic rising star among Czech conductors, and Peebo, an established yet vigorous performer, along with the Czech Philharmonic, will make for an evening of music that will be remembered for some time.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com