Concerto for marimba and orchestra by contemporary American composer Kevin Beavers will be performed by young percussionist Lenka Titzová. Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto will be performed by the young Czech pianist Klára Skalková.

Richard Wagner
Overture to the opera The Flying Dutchman WWV 63

Kevin Beavers
Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in B minor, Op. 23

Lenka Titzová – marimba
Klára Skalková – piano
Anna Bangoura – accompanying speech
Janáček philharmonic Ostrava
Juya Shin – conductor

American composer Kevin Beavers’ Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra was written in 2002 for the Boston Conservatory of Music. Rather than a melodic instrument, the marimba in the concerto is a drum, with mallets flying around it, the soloist dancing left and right, ringing out the marimba with dramatic movement. The soloist is Lenka Titzová, a young percussionist and student of the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno.

Few musical works are as endlessly popular with audiences and performers as Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. The composition met with initial rejection at the time of its composition. When the composer first played it in 1875 for the director of the Moscow Conservatoire, the piano virtuoso Nikolai Rubinstein, who was to take charge of the premiere, he described the work as unplayable and declared that the themes were corny and tiresome and that it would be best to rewrite the work from scratch. Fortunately, Tchaikovsky was not misled by this judgement and sent the concerto to the famous German pianist Hans von Bülow. The latter premiered the work with spectacular success in Boston during his American tour. The concerto will be performed by the young Czech pianist Klára Skalková, a successful student of the Prague Conservatory and a laureate of several international competitions.