Accordionist Ladislav Horák will open the Eternal Hope Festival on February 15 in Prague
He will be accompanied in the hall of the Prague Conservatory by the Prague Conservatory Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Chuhei Iwasaki. Pavel Haas’s Study of Strings written in Terezín a year before the author’s death will be heard in confrontation with Astor Piazzolla’s most famous work, Four Seasons in Buenos Aires. Anna Mašátová informed ČTK on behalf of the organizers.
“This year’s fifth year of the festival aims to implement important so-called Terezín authors into everyday musical and cultural life. Right at the beginning, we will commemorate not only the anniversary of the death of the King of Argentine tango, Astor Piazzolla, but also tango as a genre that was often played and composed in concentration camps, “said festival dramaturg Petr Nouzovský.
The festival program held until April 3 will include not only concerts in exceptional venues, but also lectures, discussions and literary readings.
A concert by the Talich Quartet will take place in the Spanish Synagogue on 21 February, featuring Viktor Ullmann’s String Quartet No. 3 in parallel with Franz Schubert’s work String Quartet Death and the Girl. The festival by violinist Josef Špaček and pianist Miroslav Sekera will be offered by the festival on March 3 at the Monastery of St. Anežky České. The lullaby for violin and piano by Gideon Klein will be performed on it in the company of the works of the Austrian-American author Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and Leoš Janáček.
The festival will end on April 3 at the U Salvátora Church with Music for Prague by Karel Husy, performed by the Music of the Castle Guard and the Police of the Czech Republic under the direction of Chief Conductor Václav Blahunka. The next program for 2022 will be announced by the Eternal Hope Festival in the coming weeks. More information can be found on the website pages festival.
Last year’s program opened with a series of spring online concerts – the For the End Quartet by violinist Jan Vodička, clarinetist Irvin Venyš, pianist Martin Kasík and cellist Jiří Bárta, and a concert recording from the Spanish Synagogue with jazz musicians David Dorůžka, Robert Fischmann and Martin Novák. With the publication of Erik Polák’s audio book Three Chapters and the Bente Kahan concert, the festival joined in commemorating the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the deportation of Jews from the Czech lands and the establishment of the ghetto in Terezín.