Young promising author Ian Mikyska created a new composition for the 70th JPO. The concert at which she will perform will be the Ostrava debut of the young French conductor Lucie Leguay, and Berg’s concert will feature Slovak violinist Dalibor Karvay, concertmaster of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

Ian Mikyska
Drops; mist; rain

Alban Berg
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra

Johannes Brahms
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73

Dalibor Karvay – violin
Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava
Lucie Leguay – conductor

JPO’s 70th-anniversary calls for a celebration. And how else to celebrate but with music? So we have given young up-and-coming composers the opportunity to create new compositions. The first of these is by Ian Mikyska, who despite his young age is one of the most outstanding contemporary composers in the field of contemporary and experimental music.

Alban Berg’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, subtitled ‘In Memory of an Angel’, is one of the highlights of the last century. The 1935 work tells the story of Manon Gropius, who succumbed to polio at the age of eighteen. Berg’s concerto depicts the tender girl’s struggle with the insidious disease and culminates in a variation on Bach’s setting of the Lutheran funeral chorale Es ist genug.

The evening closes with Brahms’ Second Symphony, sometimes called the “Pastoral” symphony because of its closeness to nature. It was composed in 1877 during the composer’s summer stay at Lake Wörthersee in Austria. A certain amount of melancholy pervades the entire work, and the composer himself stated that he had never written a work so sad before.

The concert will be the Ostrava debut of the young French conductor Lucie Leguay, and in Berg’s concert, the audience will be introduced to the Slovak violinist Dalibor Karvay, concertmaster of the Vienna Symphony.