Elgar’s Concerto and Enigma (O)

German conductor Axel Kober has held chief conducting positions at the opera houses of Schwerin, Dortmund, Mannheim, Leipzig and the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, and he also conducted at the Wagnerian Bayreuth Festival. However, to demonstrate his versatility, he will be bringing scores of Czech and British music to Prague. After Josef Suk’s *Dramatic Overture,* with which the future great composer and second student of the Czech Quartet completed his composition studies with Antonín Dvořák at the Prague Conservatory in 1892, two of Edward Elgar’s most famous compositions will be performed. A late-Romantic, self-taught composer, an outsider by definition, he lived mostly outside the metropolis, supported only by his wife’s faith in the power of talent. He eventually became famous for the *Enigma Variations,* whose heroic-melancholic style is based on musical characterisation, it is supposed to be a representation of friends. The first variation could be the composer’s wife, Alice, while the last fourteenth variation, the grand symphonic finale, could be the composer himself, already possessed of sufficient creative confidence. The *Cello Concerto* is certainly Elgar’s next most popular composition. It was created in 1919 in his summer cottage in Sussex, on the south coast of England, where the noise of the Great War could be heard from across the Channel at night during the previous year’s holidays. It has an intense depth and nostalgia, and certainly a sadness for war-torn Europe. It was not until the 1970s that the cellist Jacqueline du Pré revealed the hidden beauty of the piece to the public.

**Programme:**
- Josef Suk: *Dramatic Overture Op. 4,* 13 min.
- Edward Elgar: *Cello Concerto,* 30 min.
- Edward Elgar: *Enigma, Variations on an Original Theme Op. 36,* 31 min