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