Performers

• Jiří Ševčík — flute
• Emmanuel Villaume — conductor

Programme

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  Cosi fan tutte, overture to the opera, KV 588
• Christoph Willibald Gluck
  Concerto for Flute in G major
• Michael Fine
  A Time of Uncertainties
• Ludwig van Beethoven
  Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21

Evening’s Program

6.00 pm    Welcome drink and a tour of the exhibition 
6.30 pm    Meeting with Stories from the Arts. The curators of the Lobkowicz Collections reveal their treasures
7.00 pm    Concert in the Imperial Hall
8.15 pm    Meeting the musicians over a glass of wine with refreshments prepared by the Chef of the Lobkowicz Palace

Music director and chief conductor of PKF - Prague Philharmonia Emmanuel Villaume returns to the Metropolitan Opera in New York in the season 2021—2022 in the project The Met: Live in HD (Cinderella), to the Deutsche Oper (Hoffmann's short stories) in Berlin, Theater de la Monnaie in Brussels (Carmen) and the Dallas Opera, where he holds the position of Music Director (Orlando, Aida and Jonathan Dove's Flight).

The award-winning Emmanuel Villaume has conducted performances at the Metropolitan Opera, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, the Mariinsky Theater, the Bavarian State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Venetian Teatro La Fenice, the Paris Opera, the Teatro Regio in Torino, the Teatro Real in Madrid, the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona or the Monte-Carlo Opera.

He is equally successful in collaboration with symphonic ensembles - he has conducted the Orchester de Paris, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Montreal Symphony and the Royal Philharmonic in London. In 2008, he performed with the Chinese National Opera Orchestra at the Beijing Summer Olympics.

He graduated from the Conservatoire de Strasbourg and the Sorbonne in Paris (literature, philosophy, musicology) and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Indianapolis.

The focus of the programme for the second of this year’s concerts at the Lobkowicz Palace is on works from the Classical period – an era which our orchestra feels a great affinity with. The evening opens with the overture to Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte, filled with sparkling virtuoso sections. We will then continue with Christoph Willibald Gluck’s extremely elegant Concerto for Flute and Orchestra in G major. Gluck was famous mainly as an opera composer and he was one of the most important reformers of this genre. His Concerto for Flute, which offers soloists beautiful vocal lines as well as sections requiring bravura, has become increasingly popular among flautists today. The concerto will be performed by the first flautist of the PKF — Prague Philharmonia, Jiří Ševčík. The Classical trio is completed by Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major: a cheerful work where the influence of Mozart and Haydn is combined with the already pervasive elements of Beethoven’s later language. A contrast for the evening comes from a composition by Michael Fine, a Grammy Award winner for classical music production. Fine wrote the unsettling composition A Time of Uncertainties at an airport when he was waiting to return to Europe from the USA to visit his sick wife.