Theme

The opening concert in the beautiful Lobkowicz Palace at Prague Castle will feature the works of two giants of English music – Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel. Henry Purcell, known as "Orpheus Britannicus," was an extraordinarily prolific composer, with a significant part of his work consisting of music for plays and five famous semi-operas, which include not only singing, but also dancing and spoken dialogue. The best known of these is an adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream – The Fairy Queen, from which we have selected several arias and dances for this concert. As the title of the concert suggests, parts of the ode in honor of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians, will be performed. Georg Friedrich Händel can rightly be considered an example of an international artist who, influenced by the works of French, Italian, and German composers, made a crucial contribution to the development of opera in England. The program will feature several of his opera arias, full of intense emotions and feelings. The masterful compositions of Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel will be performed by Scottish-Maltese soprano Carine Tinney and tenor Vojtěch Semerád, accompanied by the Collegium Marianum ensemble conducted by Jana Semerádová.

An evening of chamber music at Břevnov Monastery will introduce listeners to the work of French and Italian masters who consciously incorporated various national styles into their compositions. François Couperin called the combination of the best of Italian and French styles "les goûts réunis." In this spirit, he composed a collection called Les Nations, which consists of four suites. Each begins with a trio sonata in the style of Corelli, followed by a series of dance movements in the French style. A native of Naples, Michele Mascitti found a home in Paris, where he spent the rest of his life as a renowned composer and violin virtuoso. His compositional style remained mostly Italian, but French influences can also be found in his works, especially his sonatas. Louis Gabriel Guillemain was clearly inspired by Telemann's quartets in his collections of sonatas. His "gallant conversations" between three equal melodic voices and basso continuo clearly approach the ideals of the following era, Classicism. The program will be enriched by excerpts from Laurence Stern's travelogue Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, read by Justin Svoboda.

The final concert of the spring series of Baroque Evenings will present listeners with an exceptional phenomenon combining 18th-century opera and church music. This will be achieved through the work of Johann Adolf Hasse (1699–1783), who combined the German musical tradition with a masterful command of the Italian opera style. His wife, Faustina Bordoni, the most important soprano of her time, undoubtedly played a significant role in this. The extraordinary popularity of Italian opera arias led to their frequent rewriting with Latin texts so that they could also be used in the liturgy. A remarkable number of these so-called contrafacts have been preserved in the music collection of St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague since the 1730s. The Collegium Marianum ensemble, together with soprano Pavla Radostová, will perform selected contrafacts in a modern premiere.  The Prague audience will thus have a unique opportunity to hear music that was performed more than three hundred years ago in St. Vitus Cathedral in Hradčany.