Patricia Kopatchinskaja is the soloist in Luboš Fišer’s Violin Concerto at the “Prague Spring Festival” – the final work of this unconventional composer who defended the “right to repeatability”. Bärenreiter Praha was invited to create the performance material by the Festival.
The Czech composer Luboš Fišer (1935–1999) developed a distinctive musical style of his own over the course of his career, establishing himself with this in both film and concert music. In both genres his style was characterised by a marked bipolarity: on the one hand through a lyrical, singing calm, and on the other through a dramatic, existential urgency.
Fascinated from the beginning by neoclassicism, Fišer’s search for his own style reached his goal in the 1960s when he turned to modal thinking and new compositional techniques imported from Poland. He achieved the great breakthrough in his career and his arrival on the international music scene with the 15 Prints after Dürer’s “Apokalypse”, for which he was awarded the 1st Prize at the UNESCO Tribune internationale des compositeurs in 1967.
In this evocative orchestral work, he used the selection of the six notes b-c-c#-f-f#-g for the first time. The modality, characterised by a stormy, ominously chromatic circling of these notes became a characteristic of Fišer’s writing which he gradually unfolded further and consolidated until his life’s end.
But the essence did not change. In the score of Fišer’s Violin Concerto (1997), a work from his late period, it is easy to recognise the composer who developed a magisterial and unmistakable style over a period of more than thirty years. Through abrupt switches between tenderness and wild drama, he created an intense tension. This was supported by his affinity for sharp dissonances and love of augmented fourths, fundamental and indispensable means for his sound world.
Fišer consciously strove for recognisability. “The 20th century brought an extraordinary dogma in its wake”, he once said. “An artist must always offer something new. They are supposed to shock, to surprise, and should never repeat themselves. This contradicts the fundamental principle of creating. I believe that the right to repeatability and intentional recognisability in the work of a creator will be increasingly desirable in the future, rather than the constant striving for ever-new experiments which become an end in themselves.”
Today Fišer’s output seems to be attracting more attention again. The violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja is also contributing to this, after performing some of the composer’s works at the Prague Spring Festival in 2025.
“The music of Luboš Fišer has literally overwhelmed me with its archaic power,” she says. “ ‘Crux’ for violin and timpani, the Sonata ‘Ruce’ for violin and piano, the Solo Sonata for Violin, the Violin Concerto: everything has such a strong intensity, unconditionality, and primeval power composed in a clear structure, that it directly hits the mark with me and never leaves me uninvolved.”
It is this very Violin Concerto, the composer’s last complete work, with which Kopatchinskaja returns to the Prague Spring Festival in 2026, this time in collaboration with the conductor Jakub Hrůša and the Czech Philharmonic. Audiences will recognise a reference to “Crux”, a work made famous by Gidon Kremer, which has many similarities with the Violin Concerto – as well as the overall atmosphere, the aleatoric dialogue between the virtuoso solo part and the gradually increasing presence of the percussion.
The first performance of the 12-minute work took place on 22 May 1998 in Karlovy Vary with Václav Hudeček and the Karlovy Vary Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jiří Štrunc. As the orchestral parts had been lost, Bärenreiter Praha has published the work and produced new performance material for this important concert.
Jiří Slabihoudek
(from [t]akte 1/2026)
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson)