The Les Siècles Orchestra and its period instruments were first performed in Prague
Updates: 31.05.2022 22:54
Released: 31.05.2022, 22:54
Prague – The French orchestra Les Siècles, which plays period instruments, performed today for the first time in the Czech capital. The ensemble brought a program to the Prague Spring Festival to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of César Franck, a composer who is rather neglected in Czech concert halls. He interspersed Franck’s works from the Romantic period with Claud Debussy’s famous Impressionist Sea.
Les Siècles does not focus on a single musical period. He profiles himself by presenting works from the Baroque to the present from today’s perspective, always on appropriate historical instruments. Many of them belong to the musicians themselves. This time we chose instruments that Franck knew and could hear in his day – so he used strings made of guts, for example.
The orchestra played in Rudolfinum under the baton of chief conductor Françoise-Xavier Roth, who founded the ensemble in 2003. The aim of the 50-year-old Parisian native is to introduce music to the audience as its author expected it to sound. “We are not a museum, but live musicians who have to recreate the original impression of the work,” he said of his approach.
Franck Roth was described as “one of the popes of French music”, although the composer was not French but Belgian. He wrote his most mature works after 1880, when he worked as a professor of organ at the Paris Conservatory. The Les Siècles Orchestra selected three from this period. First the symphonic poem The Cursed Hunter, then the Symphonic Variations for piano, where Bertrand Chamayou introduced himself as a soloist. In the second half of the concert, the ensemble played the Symphony in D minor, which is Franck’s most frequently performed composition.
At the end of the performance, Roth surprised the audience in Czech, after which the musicians added an excerpt from the work of Georges Bizet.
This year’s visitors to the Prague Spring were able to listen to Franck last week, when conductor Petr Altrichter performed the symphony poem Psyché with the Czech Philharmonic.
The conductor Roth will also perform at the festival on Wednesday, where he will perform at the Municipal House, headed by the Gürzenich-Orchester in Cologne.