The opening concert of the jubilee year will offer a collage of the chamber music works of our principal composers, which concurrently accentuates this year’s most important musical concern – The Year of Czech Music 2024.

The concert will commence with two compositions from the Czech Dances, the pinnacle work, and the last work of Bedřich Smetana since whose birth 200 years have elapsed this year. Next will resonate throughout the hall the only chamber opus by Gustav Mahler, otherwise a vital symphonist and a representative of Late romanticism – the one movement Piano quartet in A minor is a work of an artist of only sixteen years of age, who personally played it for the first time in 1876 on the piano at the conservatory in Vienna. Bohuslav Martinů’s Piano Trio no. 1 will transport us thence to the third decade of the 20^th century. The author commented upon the composition he wrote during a period of ten days while in Paris the following: “I do not have the slightest idea how I came to write this trio: it was sudden as if I was led by an unfamiliar hand and I composed something completely novel!” The concert will be concluded with Smetana’s Piano trio in G minor, a grandiose lyrical poem, created a little less than three months after the death of the composer’s five-year-old daughter Bedřiška.

Violist Jiří Kabát will perform as a guest of the Dvořák Trio.