A CELEBRATION OF CZECH MUSIC
Ensemble 360
Cast, Doncaster
Saturday 8 March 2025, 7.15pm
REICHA Wind Quintet in E flat Op.88 No.2
HAAS Wind Quintet
BRITTEN Wind Sextet
JANÁČEK Mládí
Janáček’s beloved Mládí (‘Youth’) was written towards the end of his life as a nostalgic celebration of memories of his youth, drawing on his early writing. Receiving its premiere performances in Autumn 1924, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of this iconic piece for wind, featuring the bass clarinet alongside a regular wind quintet line-up of flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon.
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HAAS Pavel, Suite for Oboe & Piano Op.17
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 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
HAAS Pavel, Wind Quintet Op.10
Written on the eve of the tumult of the 1930s and infused with the bleakness and forboding of the period, it remained largely unknown for decades, with nearly all copies lost during World War II. However, Czech musicologist Lubomír Peduzzi, a former student of Haas, discovered the manuscript in the Moravian Museum in Brno. His 1991 edition of the work has helped the piece find its place alongside other important wind quintets of the interwar period, such as those by Nielsen, Schoenberg, and Hindemith.
The Wind Quintet is a four-movement work characterized by its emotional depth and modal melodies. The first movement, Preludio, begins with a folk-like tune, while the second, Pregheira (“Prayer”), conveys a heartfelt spiritual yearning. The third movement, Ballo Eccentrico, is a lively, quirky dance, and the final movement, rooted in Moravian folk music, ends with an expansive, triumphant chord. Despite its predominantly minor tonality, the work is varied in mood, alternating between seriousness and cheerfulness, much like Janáček’s compositions.
Haas’ music, though overshadowed by the atrocities of the Holocaust, is now recognized as a significant contribution to 20th-century chamber music. His Wind Quintet, in particular, stands as a powerful and original work, blending folk traditions with modern compositional techniques, and is gradually earning its place in the standard repertoire.
JANÁČEK Leoš, Mládí
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
