The Lieder Company Prague has decided not to hold its planned concert season this year.
The main reason for this is the significantly lower score given to the project by the expert committee when awarding grants from the Ministry of Culture compared to the previous two years – by one and a half points. This significant and inexplicable drop also caused a substantial reduction of the subsidy by more than one third compared to last year (more precisely by CZK 105,000).
This situation put the Lieder Company Prague in a dilemma whether to carry out the concert season on a limited scale, taking painful measures (for example, a significant reduction in fees and the overwhelming majority of production and promotional work without any remuneration, cancellation of printed programmes, etc.) or not. The income from admission fees was to be crucial for the realisation, and from the beginning the association tried to keep it at the most affordable level for Prague.
Pre-sale tickets for the two-month long, heavily promoted opening concert called “Songs with Moravian Scent“, which was to take place on 24. The concert, to be held on 24 March, was practically ready and was to feature Jana Sibera and Jana Hrochová, soloists of the operas of the National Theatres in Prague and Brno, together with tenor Ondřej Holub and pianist Jan Dušek, in a very attractive programme (a complete set of Antonín Dvořák’s Moravian Duets, supplemented by extraordinary cycles by Klement Slavický, Miloslav Kabeláč and Antonín Tučapský), however, showed the audience’s virtual disinterest in a similar format of song recital, regardless of the cast and repertoire.
Given the incomprehensibly low number of six tickets sold, the company decided not to take the obvious risk of a significant loss on the entire concert season and to cancel all scheduled concerts.
