Jana Hrochová and Martin Hroch prepared a recital together with the music of Czech composers. The evening will be opened by Three Songs after Poems by Guillaume Apollinaire. The story of this composition from 1930 reads like a detective novel: it was lost and found three times. Before the premiere for the first time, during the war for the second time. Last time, it was found after long decades in 2017 in the estate of the deceased choirmaster Miroslav Košler.

The Gypsy Songs by Antonín Dvořák need no introduction. The composition from 1880 reflects the fashionable Romantic fascination with idealized images of wandering Gypsies: passionately defended motives of man’s place in nature, the essential meaning of music, and liberty as the ultimate value. Four Songs on the Words of Gustav Pfleger-Moravský is based on the composer’s early song cycle Cypresses, which he did not publish. With the cycle In Folk Tone, Dvořák took only select elements of the original folk melodies, which he transformed into a masterful idealization and stylization of folk music.

Folk inspirations are central to the oeuvre of Leoš Janáček. He made several study trips to Wallachia; he collected folk songs in Lachia and Slovakia. Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs is a collection of fifty songs that Janáček accompanied with piano part from 1892 to 1902.

The clarinetist, saxophonist, teacher, and music journalist Jiří Hlaváč composed Gloria, Three Songs to his own words in 2022 – as he himself says – as a reaction to years of stimuli from chansons, romances, and folk music. He regards the songs as a celebration of creativity unburdened by high aspirations.