Smetana: Ma Vlast (Vinyl) – Petr Popelka

In the span of only a few years, Petr Popelka has ascended swiftly to the forefront of the international conducting elite. Popelka serves as the chief conductor of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra and of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, and he appears as a guest with top European and American orchestras and at opera theatres around the world. He definitely sees Smetana not merely as a “compulsory Czech classic”, but instead as a great love and an opportunity for artistic discovery. “His masterpiece Má vlast should be done a bit like an opera, like a grand narrative… It is absolutely unique in the history of music, as a cycle of tone poems with the composer’s native land as its theme, and above all, there is no work that has ever been written with greater love.”

The album was released in 2024 on CD (and in the format Dolby Atmos as well, incidentally) to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Bedřich Smetana’s birth. Through a combination of musicality and uncompromising attention to details, the conductor and orchestra were able to give an extraordinarily finely crafted performance. This is not just one more of the countless recordings of Má vlast, as is shown by enthusiastic reviews from around the world: in February 2025, the magazine Gramophone honoured the album as the Editor’s Choice, and the December issue of the French magazine Diapason announced it as the winner of the Diapason d’Or de l’Année in the symphonic music category.

The April 2026 release of this vinyl edition of Má vlast commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra’s founding.