It was with works by French composers from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries that the Czech Philharmonic gave its traditional New Year’s concerts, Tuesday and Wednesday, in the Rudolfinum hall in Prague. The orchestra was placed for the occasion under the direction of Tomáš Netopil.
The concerts opened with the Bacchanale taken from Samson and Dalila, an opera written by Camille Saint-Saëns, followed by La Sicilienne, a dance number composed by Gabriel Fauré for the play Pelléas et Mélisande by Maurice Maeterlinck. The Czech Philharmonic also returned to the time of the Belle Époque and performed various pieces by composers such as Claude Debussy, Jules Massenet, Francis Poulenc, Maurice Ravel and Eugène Ysaÿe, before the famous Waltz by Maurice Ravel closed the program .
For the fourth year in a row, the Czech Philharmonic’s New Year concert program focuses on the music of a specific country. After Austria, Spain and the Czech Republic, it was French music that was put in the spotlight.
