SPECIAL

Leading conductor, Czech orchestral music specialist

Jiri Belohlavek, the leading Czech classical music conductor of his generation, died on Wednesday in Prague. He was 71.

His death was announced by the Czech Philharmonic, which identified the cause only as a long-term illness.

Belohlavek had an unusual history with the Philharmonic. He was chief conductor twice: for about a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, which replaced the communist government, and again since 2012.

He also led the country’s Brno Philharmonic, Prague Symphony Orchestra and Prague Philharmonia; was the popularchiefconductorofthe BBC Symphony Orchestra in Britain from 2006 to 2012; was a guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra; and conducted at the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Belohlavek was an accomplished interpreter of his country’s leading composers, including Antonin Dvorak, Leos Janacek, Bohuslav Martinu, Bedrich Smetana and Josef Suk, and his recordings helped them gain new audiences.

“Jiri Belohlavek was the most devoted and to my mind the most profound proponent of Czech orchestral music in the world today,” Michael Beckerman, the Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Music at New York University and a Czech specialist, said.

“His recordings and performances of Dvorak and Martinu, among other composers, were superb: thoughtful and filled with insight, but also wit and joy,” he added.

“His performances of such works as Martinu’s opera Plays of Mary and Dvorak’s tone poems were powerful and made an important case for including these works in the Czech and world canon.”

Jiri Belohlavek was born on 24 February, 1946, in Prague. His father, a judge and amateur pianist, introduced his son to music. Jiri joined a choir when he was four years old and soon started studying piano and cello.

He enrolled at the Prague Conservatory and at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he learned conducting under Robert Brock, Alois, Klima, Bohumir Liska and Josef Veselka. He was apprenticed to Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache and in 1970 won the Czech Young Conductors’ Competition. Under the communist regime, he was denied permission to conduct in Berlin and in Israel.

He was conductor of the Brno State Philharmonic Orchestra from 1972 to 1978 and chief conductor of the Prague Symphony Orchestra until 1989.

After the Velvet Revolution, he came to the Czech Philharmonic, the country’s major orchestra, which was founded in 1896 and 12 years later presented the premiere of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony – conducted by its composer himself.

In an era of globalised musicmaking, the ensemble has distinguished itself by retaining much of the bright, tangy sound and infectious intensity of its historical heyday.

Belohlavek’s initial tenure there was short-lived, when the musicians, newly given the power to elect their leader, voted to replace him with Gerd Albrecht, a German, whose European contacts, they thought, would attract lucrative recording contracts and concert bookings.

“I was shattered,” Belohlavek recalled in an interview in the New York Times in 2014.

After leaving his first stint with the Czech Philharmonic, Belohlavek founded the Prague Philharmonic and remained its music director until 2004.

He was principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony beginning in 2000, was named chief conductor in 2006 and conducted the popular Last Night of the Proms three times.

He resisted repeated entreaties to return to the Czech Philharmonic, but was eventually attracted by a new administration that promised to solve the orchestra’s longstanding financial and administrative difficulties. Two decades after leaving, Belohlavek was reappointed in 2012.

In 2014, the ensemble toured the United States, including Carnegie Hall, where, James R Oestreich wrote in the New York Times: “The strings were warm and caressing, the brasses brash and incisive; the woodwinds sang with a slightly nasal, Slavic character and danced with a playful show of elbows and knees.”

Belohlavek is survived by his wife and two daughters. © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service

“Jiri Belohlavek was the most devoted and to my mind the most profound proponent of Czechorchestralmusic in the world today”