Prague Spring: PKF — Prague Philharmonia & Oksana Lyniv

Oksana Lyniv is a conductor with a dazzling international career, and an artist dedicated to the development of the classical music scene in her native Ukraine. She is the first woman to have conducted at the Bayreuth Festival. Six years ago she founded the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, with whom she appeared in 2022 at the prestigious festival in Lucerne.

At the invitation of the Prague Spring she will conduct the PKF — Prague Philharmonia, appearing alongside soprano Yuliya Tkachenko and the winners of the Prague Spring International Music Competition, bassoonist Minju Kim and clarinetist Lilian Lefebvre. The concert will feature W. A. Mozart’s “Prague” symphony, Richard Strauss’s Duett-Concertino, and a new work set to texts by Ukrainian poet Lina Kostenko, composed by her compatriot Eduard Resatsch.

Lyniv is the founder and conductor of the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine and she also set up the LvivMozArt Festival in Lviv in Western Ukraine. She is particularly fond of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and will appear at the Prague Spring with his Symphony No. 38, known as the “Prague Symphony”.

The concert will begin with a performance from young soprano Yuliya Tkachenko, whom Lyniv invited to give the world premiere of a new work set to texts by a living classic of Ukrainian poetry, Lina Kostenko; the piece was written by Eduard Resatsch, a composer and cellist from Lviv who plays in the Bamberg Symphony under Chief Conductor Jakub Hrůša.

The evening in the Dvořák Hall will also see the return of the winners of last year’s Prague Spring International Music Competition, who will together perform Strauss’s Duett-Concertino for clarinet, bassoon and chamber orchestra, a poetic, late work filled with wonderful melodies and inspired by the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast.