Hamburger Camerata / Zlata Chochieva / Gábor Hontvári

On the Elbe and the Vltava

The River Vltava, known in German as the Moldau, merges with the Elbe a few miles north of Prague. From here to Hamburg, it is a distance of nearly 800 km. Not round the corner, in other words, but not on a different continent. Yet the paths of the best-known composers of what are now twin towns only crossed in Vienna., where »Hamburg lad« Johannes Brahms helped Antonín Dvořák, the son of a Prague butcher, to achieve his breakthrough in 1877. The concert given by the Hamburger Camerata takes the two composers, who remained friends for the rest of their lives, »back to their roots«.