About the App

Concert Archive of the Slovak Philharmonic

An expert-curated archive of classical music unlike any other. It is not just a collection of videos – it is a complete database of concert life at the Slovak Philharmonic from 1947 to the present: 6,396 concerts, 8,120 works, 6,887 people and 39,551 documented appearances. Each concert is placed in context: who performed, what, when, where – and how we know.

What sets us apart

Most music institutions have a simple YouTube video and a concert list on their website. The Concert Archive of the Slovak Philharmonic goes far beyond that.

A player that understands music

Our video player is not just a window with a Play button. The concert programme runs below the video, automatically highlighting the currently playing work and its movement. Click any work in the programme to jump to its beginning – including individual movements of larger pieces. With a Beethoven symphony, you can click directly on the 3rd movement without searching through two hours of recording.

The player supports automatic subtitles in Slovak and English, YouTube-inspired keyboard shortcuts and frame-precise navigation for professional users.

Selected concerts offer multiple audio tracks – for example a boosted mix and Hi-Fi recording, or multilingual dubbing. You can switch audio tracks directly in the player. Each concert can have custom track names matching the recording content.

If you want to share a specific moment, click the link icon in the player – it copies a URL with the exact time position and part number.

A database, not a list

Every concert is connected to hundreds of related data points:

• Composers – 1,764 profiles from the Middle Ages to the present, with biographies, work catalogues and links to concerts where their music was performed
• Performers and conductors – profiles with photographs, biographies and complete concert history at the Slovak Philharmonic
• Musical works – thousands of compositions with composers, arrangers, individual movements and performance history
• Ensembles – Slovak Philharmonic, Slovak Philharmonic Choir, Slovak Chamber Orchestra and more – with concert history and member lists
• Offices over time – who was chief conductor, director general or dramaturge, and when, with dates and source
• Programme notes – expert texts accompanying individual concerts, often containing information not available elsewhere on the internet; for more than a thousand concerts also the printed programme itself, to page through

Everything is interconnected: from a composer you can reach their works, from a work to concerts, from a concert to the conductor, from the conductor to other concerts they conducted.

Seventy-nine years

The archive does not begin in 2008, when the first version of the application was built. It reaches back to 1947, and its densest decade is the 1960s – 1,711 concerts, more than any other. The 1950s hold 989 concerts, the 1970s 1,072.

For most of these concerts no recording ever existed. They are in the archive for their programme, their performers and the source they were transcribed from – the printed season programme, the daily programme note or a contemporary review. The shape of that curve therefore says less about concert life than about how much we have managed to transcribe so far.

A video archive and an encyclopaedia

The archive has two layers. The Concerts section is a video archive – it contains only what you can play, more than 800 concerts today. Whatever you click there, plays.

The encyclopaedia is everything else: more than six thousand concerts since 1947, most of which were never recorded. You reach them through the profiles of people and ensembles, seasons, the calendar, the Bratislava Music Festival and search. There, “no recording” does not disappoint – you came for the facts, not for the video.

A conductor's or performer's profile therefore shows their entire history with the Slovak Philharmonic, not only what was filmed. Ľudovít Rajter, founder and first chief conductor of the orchestra, has 85 concerts he conducted in the archive and another 23 at the Bratislava Music Festival – starting with the very first concert of the Slovak Philharmonic on 27 October 1949. A concert without a recording is marked, and the With recording filter hides it with one click. Likewise, the lists of conductors, choirmasters and performers include those whose concerts we have no recording of.

A concert without a video shows an illustration instead of the player – the cover of the period programme or a photograph – together with the programme, performers, editorial note and contemporary press coverage.

Paging through programmes

More than a thousand concerts come with their daily programme – the printed booklet the audience held in their hands. The older ones are scans, the oldest from the orchestra's very first concert in 1949; the newer ones are as they went to press. You page through them right in the browser like a magazine: cover, double-page spreads, thumbnails of all pages, zoom and full screen. With scans of a folded sheet, the archive cuts and orders the pages in reading order by itself.

Bratislava Music Festival – an encyclopaedia of the festival

The archive maintains a dedicated section for the Bratislava Music Festival (Bratislavské hudobné slávnosti), an international festival held in Bratislava since 1965 and organised today by the Slovak Philharmonic. Each edition has its own programme, news, ticket information and a list of the people who prepared it.

What matters is what it contains: all 61 editions, from 1965 to 2026, 2,369 concerts in total. Not only the ones we filmed. We hold a recording of 106 of them; the remaining 2,263 are documented without video – with the full programme, performers, programme note, admission and venue. A visiting orchestra from 1972 that nobody recorded is therefore not missing from the festival's history.

1,310 concerts carry an editorial note and 5,142 programme items state the source they were transcribed from.

Festival concerts are linked to the rest of the archive: a work in the programme leads to its composer's profile and to other concerts where it was performed, a performer to their complete history at the Slovak Philharmonic.

A cancelled concert does not disappear – it stays with its programme and performers, only marked as cancelled. That too is part of the festival's history.

The outline of every edition is in place; individual editions are being verified against sources and completed as we go.

CDs of the Slovak Philharmonic

Recordings produced by the Slovak Philharmonic and issued under its own label used to leave a single trace – a chapter in the annual report. The archive brings them together for the first time: 37 titles from 2005 to 2025, with programmes, casts, reviews and where to buy them.

Every release lists what is on it (107 tracks) and who made it (69 names and ensembles) – including the people the annual reports never named: recording supervision, sound engineers, mastering and cover artwork. Only the booklet holds those, and the booklets we have in digital form can be paged through in the browser.

The catalogue is not a side room. Where a name could be matched to the register it leads to a profile: from a release to its conductor, and from there to his concerts. It works the other way too – for 98 concerts the archive shows that a work from the programme also exists on record, and a work's page shows the same. It is not the same performance; what they share is the work, and the archive says so plainly.

Awards appear with the release and in the profiles (Radio_Head Awards 2017 for the orchestral works of Peter Kolman). Reviews are not retyped but cited to the STN ISO 690 standard – the same one used for concert reviews, so they also show up in the reviewer's profile.

A further 151 recordings the orchestra made for other labels (Naxos, Marco Polo, OPUS and others) are listed separately. The Philharmonic neither issued nor sells them, but they belong to its history.

A title issued under the Philharmonic's own label can be reserved at the box office straight from its page.

How we know

For a concert fifty years old it is not enough to list the programme – one has to say what it was transcribed from. The archive therefore records a source for programme items: the concert's daily programme note, the printed programme of the edition, a contemporary review or a catalogue record.

We distinguish announced from performed. A work the programme note listed but which was not played stays in the programme, marked as such; conversely, anything played that the printed programme did not list carries the note not listed in the printed programme – there are 306 such items in the festival alone. Contradictions are not smoothed over: where the detail page of a programme note and the calendar grid disagree about the starting time, the note says so, and which of the two applies.

We do not correct misprints in sources. Where a period programme printed a name incorrectly, the correct form is in the database and the incorrect one remains as an alias – so the person can be found by the old spelling, yet the archive does not claim that was their name.

Most of what we know about the older seasons rests on two sources.

Anton Viskup (1953–2026), double bass player of the Slovak Philharmonic from 1972 to 1995 and its dramaturge in 1996 – 2001 and 2003 – 2013, compiled the catalogue Koncertné sezóny SF 01 – 77 – two thousand pages of concerts, the work of a lifetime. It is the most complete survey of the orchestra's concert life in existence.

Prof. PhDr. Dušan Katuščák, PhD., had the collection Slovenská filharmónia: Programy 1949 – 1972 digitised in 2013 and handed it over in 2017 together with a letter describing the method – eleven folders, every sheet scanned on both sides, every page including the blank ones. Because of that we can say, for any given programme, which page of which booklet it comes from.

We treat neither of them as infallible. Viskup's catalogue has not been verified against printed sources, and the scans also carry handwritten notes that need not be contemporary. That is precisely why the data are cross-checked – and where two sources disagree, the archive says so rather than choosing between them.

The Researcher mode switch in the page header (the graduation cap icon) reveals this layer – on the festival pages and on concerts in the archive: sources, editorial notes, press coverage and the difference between the announced and the performed programme. A concert that has such a layer points you to it. It stays out of the way of the ordinary visitor, and the specialist reader misses nothing.

External sources and data verification

A music database of this scope requires constant accuracy checks. That is why we attach links to external sources – Wikipedia, the Music Centre Slovakia, IMSLP, artists' personal websites and others – to profiles of composers, performers and works. These links serve to cross-reference the data we provide and allow users to deepen their knowledge from multiple independent sources. We recommend always verifying the accuracy of information by comparing several sources.

At the same time, none of these external sources alone offers what our archive does – Wikipedia has no concert recordings of the Slovak Philharmonic, IMSLP has no videos, and the Music Centre Slovakia does not link composers to works, concerts and performers. The archive brings all of this together and uses links to independent sources to reinforce credibility. This is the approach used by the world's leading music databases.

Media coverage and citations to standard

We attach reviews and media coverage to concerts – from cultural portals, print and radio. We do not reproduce their text; we provide a full bibliographic citation to STN ISO 690 so that it can be pasted into an academic paper without further editing:

VACHOVÁ, Zuzana. Triumfálny Beethoven. In: Moja kultúra [online]. 6. 10. 2025 [viewed 2026-08-14]. ISSN 2729-7950. Available from: https://eculturebase.com/moja-kultura/14061/triumfalny-beethoven

The Copy citation button puts it on your clipboard.

The current edition, STN ISO 690:2022, adopts the international standard ISO 690:2021, which sets out principles of citation rather than one binding layout. The specific form of our citations therefore follows the methodology of Prof. Dušan Katuščák, established in Slovak libraries and universities. The standard is published by the Slovak Office of Standards, Metrology and Testing and is sold commercially – the link above leads to the catalogue record, not to the text itself.

The date in square brackets is not the current date but the day we last verified the link – exactly what the standard requires for an electronic source. We therefore check links in batches: working links have their verification date refreshed, broken ones are flagged, and where an archived copy exists in the Internet Archive, the link leads there. The citation still cites the original source, not the copy.

A printed source can be cited too – a review from a magazine or newspaper that exists nowhere online. Such a citation gives the volume, issue and pages, and carries no [viewed] date: a printed article does not change, so the day we saw it does not belong in it. Where a digitised PDF of the issue exists, the link opens it at the right page.

Every item also shows its medium – written text, audio or video review. A radio review is a source of equal standing to an article.

The author of a review is more than a name under the text. They have a profile in the archive stating what they do (music journalist, opera critic, musicologist), with a list of all their texts about our concerts. You can also go the other way round: from the reviewer to what they have written about the Slovak Philharmonic. When a single text reviews two concerts, we list it once and link to both.

Intelligent search

Search works across the entire archive – simultaneously searching concerts, composers, performers, works and ensembles. Simply type “Dvorak cello” to find concerts with Dvorak cello works. Search understands multi-word queries and works with diacritics.

Bilingual URL addresses

The entire archive is fully bilingual – including URL addresses. The Slovak version uses /skladatelia, /koncerty, /dirigenti, the English version /composers, /concerts, /conductors. This is not just a language switcher – each language version has its own URL structure optimised for search engines.

Interactive timeline

Over 1,700 composers displayed on a visual timeline from the Middle Ages to the present. Colour-coded periods (Baroque, Classicism, Romanticism, Modern) help navigate the history of music. Nationality filters allow focusing on, for example, Slovak composers only.

Calendar

An interactive calendar displays all concerts in a clear monthly or weekly view. See when and where each concert took place, and click to go directly to its detail page.

Playlists

Create custom selections of works from different concerts. The player plays them seamlessly – you can assemble your own concert programme from the entire archive.

Favourite concerts

Mark any concert as a favourite with a star. Your favourites are accessible via the icon in the navigation bar and are stored directly in your browser – no registration required.

Recommendations after playback

After watching a concert or playlist, the archive recommends related videos. The algorithm selects by content: first concerts with Slovak composers (if they were in the programme), then concerts with the same composers, other recordings of the same work and concerts from the same period.

Slide-style gallery

Concerts with photo galleries display photos in classic slide style – uniform frames, full uncropped photos, with interactive zoom on hover. Click to open a full-screen lightbox.

Solos – exceptional moments

Besides complete recordings, we also offer short solo excerpts – the most beautiful moments by performers from concerts. Solos can be browsed by composer, performer or instrument. They play in an elegant mini-player that opens directly on the page.

Dark and light mode

The archive automatically adapts to your device settings. Dark mode is ideal for watching concerts in the evening – it's easier on the eyes and matches the atmosphere of a concert hall. You can also switch modes manually using the icon in the navigation bar.

CMSF – Central Brain of the Slovak Philharmonic

For internal users, the archive also serves as a complete database of all concerts – including those that were not recorded. Every concert has a status (draft, database, published) and the archive thus serves as the single source of truth for the concert history of the Slovak Philharmonic.

How it works

Concert videos are recorded and produced by StreamTeam – the audiovisual production department of the Slovak Philharmonic. Recordings are stored on MEGA cloud storage and made accessible through this archive; until the end of 2026 some older recordings are still played via the Vimeo platform.

The application was originally launched in 2008. In 2025–2026 it underwent a complete modernisation – new design, new architecture, new features. The application was designed and is managed by Marek Piaček. The code was created with the assistance of Claude AI (Anthropic).