The Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra was established in 1929 as the first professional symphony orchestra in Slovakia. The orchestra is currently led by conductor Ondrej Lenárd.

It has made a large number of recordings for labels including Opus, Supraphon, Naxos and Marco Polo.

In addition to regular season concerts, which feature works by Slovak composers, many of them as premieres, the orchestra has performed at concerts abroad, visiting Austria and Hungary, and touring in Europe, Japan and Korea. The orchestra has collaborated with renowned conductors such as Ľudovít Rajter, Ondrej Lenárd, Róbert Stankovský, Juraj Valčuha, Andrew Mogrelia, David Porcelijn, Vladimir Spivakov, Petr Altrichter and also with distinguished soloists.

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Photo: P. Kastl

Swiss-born conductor-composer Adriano lives in Zurich. As a musician he is mostly self-taught.

In the late 1970s he established himself as a specialist on Ottorino Respighi and he has conducted many other recordings of obscure or neglected symphonic repertoire. On Marco Polo/Naxos he initiated and recorded a series of 15 albums mainly of European film music composers, and created and directed a series of classical music videos. All of his recording projects, realised with orchestras in Moscow and Bratislava (49 albums, 21 of which featuring music by Swiss composers) have found wide recognition, and his commitment is totally dedicated and uncompromising. Between 2003 and 2017 he has recorded the complete orchestral works by Fritz Brun over 10 albums.

Adriano’s compositions include concertinos for piano, celesta, harpsichord and Ondes Martenot and an Obscure Saraband for organ, chimes, timpani and strings. His quintet for clarinet and strings is entitled Thoughts and Associations. His many instrumental adaptations include songs by Modest Mussorgsky (four cycles), Ottorino Respighi (five cycles), Johannes Brahms (Vier ernste Gesänge), Hugo Wolf, Othmar Schoeck, Fritz Brun, Jacques Ibert, Louis Gruenberg and Johann Strauss II. Ravel’s Tzigane (premiered in Halle’s Handel-Haus in 2013) also belongs to this list, as well as two different short chamber versions of Antonin Dvořák’s opera Rusalka, one of which ran for 53 performances in Krefeld’s and Monchengladbach’s theatres. Adriano’s successful arrangement of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet (2008) has been performed in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and England by internationally renowned artists.

A member of the group of young French composers of the early 1920s known as ‘Les Six’, Georges Auric was a prolific composer, while serving until World War II as a music critic and in the 1960s as director of the Paris Opéra and Opéra-comique. In style he ranged from the clarity espoused by Les Six to later experiments with serialism.

Film and Stage Music

In the 1920s Auric was associated with Sergey Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes company. He contributed to Cocteau’s collaborative Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel, and he collaborated with Nijinska in Les Fâcheux; with Massine in Les Matelots, Le Peintre et son modèle and, in 1960, in Bal des voleurs; with Balanchine in Concurrence; with Lifar in Phèdre; and with Gsovsky, in 1951, in Chemin de lumière. He provided incidental music for the theatre and film scores for Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète, L’Éternel Retour, La Belle et la Bête, Orphée and L’Aigle à deux têtes, and Max Ophuls’s Lola Montes, among many others.

Chamber and Piano Music

Auric’s chamber music includes a Violin Sonata and a Trio for oboe, clarinet and bassoon. His piano music ranges from his Prélude for the Album des six in 1922 to sets of impromptus, bagatelles and short pieces, with a weightier Partita for two pianos.