A CELEBRATION OF CZECH MUSIC

Furioso 
Con fuoco. Con moto e poco largamente 
Moderato 
 

Pavel Haas, born in Brno into a Jewish family, was a pupil of Leoš Janáček from 1920 to 1922. Though his music doesn’t imitate that of his great teacher, both composers sought inspiration from Moravian folk song and dance. Janáček once declared that ‘a modern composer has to write what he has truly experienced’, but Haas was to experience more and much worse than most. However, in 1939, when he wrote the Suite for Oboe, he had just been awarded the Smetana Prize for his opera, The Charlatan, first performed at Brno in 1938. The musical language of the Suite, occasionally folk-inspired, sometimes recalling the cadences of Synagogue songs, and notable for its energy and drive, marks out Haas as a composer of real individuality, rugged in the first two movements, and more consoling in the third, rising to a grand climax that has occasional echoes of his great teacher. 

Haas was deported to the concentration camp and ghetto at Teresienstadt in 1941 where he met the conductor Karel Ančerl as well as several other Czech Jewish composers such as Gideon Klein (who coaxed Haas back to composition), Hans Krása and Viktor Ullmann. In later years, it was Ančerl who most movingly recalled the appalling circumstances of Haas’s murder after both were transferred to Auschwitz: Ančerl was next in line to be sent to the gas chamber when Haas coughed, thus attracting the attention of the SS Doctor Josef Mengele, who chose to send Haas to his death instead.  

Nigel Simeone 2014 

JANÁČEK Leoš, In the Mists 

Janáček inspiration for In the mists probably came from a recital at the Brno Organ School on 28 January 1912 when Marie Dvořáková played Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau. In the mists certainly shows the influence of Debussy’s Impressionism, though it is also a nostalgic reflection on childhood: Bohumír Štědroň wrote that ‘Here Janáček sees his youth in a mist and remembers the days spent at Hukvaldy’. Janáček made some revisions to the cycle before publication by the Club of the Friends of Art in Brno (to which Janáček belonged) near the end of 1913. According to the title page of this edition, In the mists was given to members of the club as a gift for the year 1913. The first performance took place on 7 December 1913 at Kroměříž, played by Marie Dvořáková. She played it again, on 24 January 1914, at a Brno Organ School concert in the Lužánky Hall when Janáček himself was present. The first known performance in Prague was not until 16 December 1922, given by the pianist Václav Štěpán and the following year Janáček asked Štěpán to help him prepare an edition incorporating his final versions. An inspired combination of Impressionism and musical ideas derived from Moravian folk music, In the mists is in four movements: the first haunting (and occasionally trouble), the second quite free, the third based on a memorable melody heard at the start, and the fourth hints at the flourishes of gypsy music as well as moments of high drama. All four movements are permeated by tenderness and nostalgia, without any hint of sentimentality. 

Nigel Simeone 

Janáček composed Mládí in July 1924 (the month of his 70th birthday) at his rural retreat in the village of Hukvaldy. He described it to Kamila Stösslová as ‘a sort of memoir of youth’, and a newspaper article in December 1924 described the programme of the suite as follows: ‘In the first movement, [Janáček] remembers his childhood at school in Hukvaldy, in the second the sad scenes of parting with his mother at the station in Brno, in the third in 1866 as a chorister when the Prussians were in Brno; the concluding movement is a courageous leap into life.’ Intended as a nostalgic evocation of Janáček’s youth (his original title was Mladý život – Young Life) it is a typically quirky and ebullient product of his incredibly productive old age. It was first performed in Brno on 24 October 1924, followed a month later by a performance in Prague. Janáček also heard the work during his only visit to England, at a concert in the Wigmore Hall on 6 May 1926 when it was played by British musicians including Leon Goossens and Aubrey Brain. 

Nigel Simeone © 2011