Czech Philharmonic • Jakub Hrůša

The composer, conductor, choirmaster, multi-instrumentalist, and music producer Jaroslav Krček has been active in the fields of classical and folk music and its popularisation for more than half a century. For many years, besides composing, his primary areas of interest have been the music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods and folklore. From 1954 to 1959 Krček studied cello under Václav Beran at a music school in České Budějovice, then he was admitted to the third year of study at the Prague Conservatoire, where from 1959 to 1962 he studied composition under Miloslav Kabeláč and conducting under Bohumír Liška. During his studies in Prague, he collaborated with the Josef Vycpálek Song and Dance Ensemble, and from 1962 he served as the director of musical programming, first for Czechoslovak Radio in Pilsen, then for the music publisher Supraphon. From the early 1960s he conducted the Czechoslovak Radio Chamber Orchestra in Pilsen, he was the choirmaster of the Czech Song Mixed Choir, and he also collaborated with the folklore ensemble Úsměv (Smile) from Horní Bříza. His strong interest in Czech folk music, in new music in the folk style, and in Czech music from earlier times led him to establish the music and dance ensemble Chorea Bohemica (1967) and later on the ensemble Musica Bohemica (1975), which he still conducts, serving as its artistic director. He is also an experienced singer, and he plays many different instruments, making some of them himself specifically for use in his ensemble.

From the turn of the 1970s and ’80s, Jaroslav Krček successfully established enduring relationships with professional music ensembles, and he also made a major contribution to the advancement of amateur music making in this country. Many of his folksong arrangements are very popular with school choirs and amateur ensembles for all age categories, and Krček’s efforts have also brought the music of earlier periods to the awareness of these performers. His systematic work with Chorea Bohemica and Musica Bohemica has had a major influence on the music education of young people in this country. Hundreds of educational concerts and performances have inspired choirs and instrumental ensembles to perform music from earlier times, and Krček was a powerful force shaping a new understanding of folk music and early music by performers and listeners alike. In 2019, he was honoured by the Czech Ministry of Culture for these activities.

In parallel with his interest in early music and folk music, he has also pursued a different line of activity, composing symphonic, chamber, and vocal music of his own. Besides his countless arrangements of folk songs, and dances, he has composed works in a wide range of genres. Among his most important works are nine symphonies, cantatas, and oratorios (O lux mundi, 1985; The One Who Is, Op. 137, 2009; Creed of the Master John, Op. 150, 2014 etc.), melodramas, ballets and dance frescoes, operas (The Prostitute Rahab, Op. 36, 1971; In the Shadow of the Cross, Op. 129, 2005; Clothes Like the World Has Never Seen, Op. 139, 2010; Behind the Curtain of Time, Op. 146, 2013), and sacred music. In 1971 his electronic opera The Prostitute Rahab (Nevěstka Raab) won a prize at an international composition competition in Geneva, and he won the top prize several times at the competition Prix de musique folklorique de Radio Bratislava. He has been equally prolific in his activities as a conductor and a music producer.

As a composer, he has strong opinions that are not influenced by changing fashions, and all his life he has strived to make his music an adornment of life that brings satisfaction and elevates the spirit. Above all, he wants his music to captivate listeners. This is true of the work being premiered today, the four-movement Symphony No. 7 for symphony orchestra and solo marimba, Op. 153, which was completed in January 2015 and is one of the composer’s shorter symphonic works.

Bohuslav Martinů came from Polička, and his childhood is connected with St James’s Church and the immediate surroundings of the town. He began his violin studies as a child and furthered them at the Prague Conservatoire, but he did not graduate because his interests were diffused in other directions. At the same time, he began writing his first compositions, initially for string instruments, then for piano etc. In 1912, having completed remedial studies and passed the state examination on violin, he joined the second violin section of the Czech Philharmonic. He also had his first successes as a composer—his Czech Rhapsody was given a performance, and later the National Theatre premiered his ballet Ishtar. Martinů showed a renewed interest in composing and studied for a year under Josef Suk at the Prague Conservatoire. In the autumn of 1923, he received a scholarship to study under Albert Roussel in Paris. Martinů’s first period as a composer shows him searching for a compositional language of his own. He took the strong tradition of Czech music and French Impressionism as his points of departure, and he was also captivated by Richard Strauss’s orchestration. New horizons were opened to Martinů in Paris, where he became well acquainted not only with Roussel’s music, but also with Stravinsky, Les Six, and jazz. In the 1930s, Baroque forms begin to emerge in Martinů’s works, and above all there was inspiration from folk music. The Munich Agreement and the Nazi invasion of France forced Martinů to flee to the USA, where he composed his symphonies and also found a new public. After the war, he never returned home, living successively in Italy, France, and Switzerland, where he died.

Martinů wrote his Violin Concerto No. 2, H. 293, between February and April 1943 in New York on commission for the famed American violinist of Ukrainian descent Mischa Elman (1891–1967), who had heard Martinů’s Symphony No. 1 in New York in January 1943. For the programme notes of the concerto’s premiere, the composer himself wrote: “The idea for this concerto presented itself to me with the following order—Andante, a broad lyric song of great intensity which leads to a Poco allegro, exploiting the technique and the virtuosity of the instrument, and has the aspect of a single-movement composition. The definitive form complies with concerto structure. I have preserved its grave character, lyric in the first part, and even in the middle Allegro, the Andante theme returns to close the movement. The second part is a sort of point of rest, a bridge progressing towards the final Poco allegro. It is an intermezzo moderato, almost bucolic, accompanied by only a part of the orchestra and progressing attacca into the finale, which is Poco allegro. This movement favours the technique of the violin, which is interrupted by broad and massive tutti passages. The concerto ends with a sort of stretto, Allegro (vivo). [...] As with all compositions for solo instrument, the solo violin requires a quite special ‘state of mind.’ [...] For the violin solo, all which we wish to express must be contained in a single line, which must also imply the rest.”

The Sinfonietta is Leoš Janáček’s last orchestral work, finished in 1926. It was first performed that year on 26 June with Václav Talich conducting the Czech Philharmonic at Prague’s Municipal House as part of the Eighth All-Sokol Festival in Prague. The original title had been Military Sinfonietta, and the premiere was given under the title Sokol Festival Sinfonietta. Janáček called the composition a reminiscence of the experiences of the First World War and of what he felt when Czechoslovakia was established as a free country, as he formulated his thoughts in a recollection of his experiences in Brno in a short essay he wrote for the issue of the newspaper Lidové noviny that appeared on 24 December 1927: “And all at once I saw the city in a miraculous transformation. [...] The magical glow of freedom and rebirth loomed over the city on 28 October 1918! I saw myself in the city, and I belonged to it. And the blaring of victorious trumpets, the holy peacefulness of the Queen’s monastery at Úvoz, the nocturnal shadows and breath of the green hill, and the vision of the certain growth and greatness of the town, of my city Brno, gave rise within me to the Sinfonietta.” The composition was originally intended to be played outdoors, but it gradually grew into a work for full symphony orchestra. The composer later abandoned the programmatic titles of individual movements (Fanfares, The Castle, The Queen’s Monastery, The Street, and The Town Hall). The work is dedicated to the British author and arts patron Rose Newmarch, who made the arrangements for Janáček’s musical tour of England in 1926.