An exceptional listening experience will be offered by Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, one of the most popular and best-known romantic piano concertos, performed by Lukáš Vondráček.

Jean Sibelius
Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 105

Maurice Ravel
La valse, dance poem for orchestra

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

Lukáš Vondráček – piano
Janáček philharmonic Ostrava
Daniel Raiskin – conductor

Jean Sibelius was not only a leading composer of Finnish national music, but also a composer in whom the spirit of the early 20th century was fully expressed. The Seventh Symphony, which the composer completed in 1924, is his last work in this genre. Sibelius is said to have composed it in the evenings in the company of a bottle of good whisky. The impressive one-movement composition alternates vital, joyful music with passages both passionate and deeply melancholic.

The dance poem for orchestra La Valse is one of the most popular works by the French composer Maurice Ravel. The 1919-1920 work was originally written as a ballet for the renowned Parisian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, but became more popular on the concert stages. Here, as in the famous Bolero, Ravel applied his mastery of the orchestral colour palette. The constant transformations and new caricatures of the waltz rhythm gradually graduate in the final dance ecstasy.

Pianist Lukáš Vondráček, who today ranks among our most internationally renowned performers, will be the soloist of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto as the finale of the New Year’s Concerto. One of the best-known and most popular romantic piano concertos is a work that is not only extremely demanding for the soloist, but also a work whose energetic music guarantees an exceptional listening experience.