Page 690 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

Pesek championed classical music but his first love was jazz
ALAMY
At the age of eight he began taking piano lessons. At about the same time his mother took him

to his first concert, where he saw Rafael Kubelik, the great Czech maestro, conduct. He recalled

treating wartime air raids as adventures, taking a notebook to the scene of the devastation as if
reporting for the school magazine.

There was however, a much darker side to his wartime experiences. He witnessed as a child the
brutality of the Nazi occupation of Prague, as Czechs were murdered by the occupiers. When the

war was approaching its end in 1945, many in Prague hoped that US forces, already in western

Czechoslovakia, would liberate their city. But it was the Red Army that arrived.

Pesek, then 12 years old, remembered a beautiful garden in Prague with lawns and flowers that

had seemed a haven from wartime horrors. And then “suddenly there were Russians . . . and the

first Russian tank which came in just drove through this beautiful garden, through this lawn and

those flowers and something in me collapsed. I knew that a new age was coming in, and it really
did come in.”