The Hradec Králové Philharmonic and K.J.Erben

The master of imaginative verse who inspired Czech composers. A. Dvořák’s Golden Spinning-Wheel and J. Filas’s Záhoř’s Bed captured by Czech TV cameras.

The Hradec Králové Philharmonic is indubitably an excellent Czech orchestra with an extremely inventive dramaturgic concept, as any regular visitor of its performances will attest. Its concert in Hradec Králové on 14 January 2021, on occasion of the 150th anniversary of the death of Karel Jaromír Erben, the larger-than-life Romantic writer, ultimately had to be conceived as the kind of audience-less performance which coronavirus restrictions have been necessitating across venues and genres, but has been captured by the cameras of Czech television under strict safety measures.

Karel Jaromír Erben clearly had a special relation to Eastern Bohemia and to Hradec Králové – he was born in the East Bohemian town of Miletín and attended the academic high-school in Hradec Králové. Erben, a collector of folk poetry, owes much of his fame to the collection A Bouquet of Folk Legends; in the spirit of views held by the Grimm Brothers, who were among his acquaintances, he sought a reflection of Old Slavic myths in the oral folk tradition.

This concert demonstrates the degree to which Erben, master of the imaginative verse that he was, proves to be a fantastic inspiration for Czech composers – i.e., in this case, for Antonín Dvořák, whose lavish tone poem The Golden Spinning-Wheel was performed at the concert, and for one of the most accomplished living composers in the Czech Republic, Juraj Filas, who took his inspiration from one of Erben’s ballads collected in the Bouquet for his 2018 cantata for soli, choir, and orchestra based on K. J. Erben’s poem Záhoř’s Bed.

Production year 2021
TV Director Tomáš Šimerda
Production Company Czech Television
Choir Prague Philharmonic Choir
Chorus Master L. Vasilek
Orchestra / Band Hradec Králové Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor L. Svárovský
Soloist M. Štiková Gemrotová, M. Lehotský, D. Matoušek, F. Bandžak