The Belfiato Quintet are yet another exciting Czech chamber ensemble active in the international arena. The members of the young wind quintet perform with renowned orchestras and both as individuals and collectively hav egarnered accolades at competitions. This acclaim, however, has not gone to their heads, with their performances above all revealing their attitude: ''We enjoy it!'' The debut studio album, which they hvae recorded 12 years after the ensemble's foundation, exclusively features Czech music dating from the first half of the 20th century. J.B. Foerster composed the Wind Quintet in 1909 to commission for a virtuoso ensemble, formed by the members of the Wiener Philharmoniker. The work by Janáček's pupil Pavel Haas, written two decades later, bears traces of inspiration by folk music, Janáček, as well as Stravinsky. When listening to the piece, it is difficult indeed to resign oneself to the chilling fact that this immense young talent was silenced for ever at Auschwitz. Leos Janáček had created his wind sextet Youth just five years previously. Owing to the music teeming with joie de vivre, prevailing over languor and melancholia, one is hard pressed to believe that the artist was 70 years of age when he composed it.

This collection from the legacy of Jirí Belohlávek was put together during the year after the demise of this outstanding conductor. It is intended mainly as a recollection of this extraordinary musician and person. His life can be briefly described by enumerating the greatest of his achievements (Chief Conductor of the Czech Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra, guest conductor with the Berliner Philharmoniker, New York Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, appearances at the MET, Glyndebourne, etc.; holder of the Commander of the Order of the British Empire /CBE/ title). The Maestro himself may have preferred a sharing of memories to recordings; yet the set of twenty-three pieces taken from the almost three hundred pieces from Supraphon archives and recorded in the years 1971 – 2016 is a wonderful illustration of Belohlávek’s professional maturing. They capture him as a conductor of several leading Czech orchestras, beginning with the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra and concluding by the Czech Philharmonic and Prague Philharmonia. In the very centre of Belohlávek’s repertoire we find compositions by Dvorák (From the New World), Smetana (My Country), Suk, Janácek and, notably, Martinu, whom he introduced to the world. The collection is enriched by several side-steps into other areas of repertoire including Mozart, Ravel, Mahler and Bartók, which documents the amazing scope of the conductor’s focus.

The idea of arranging Janacek's two string quartets for string orchestra has implicated two different approaches for me. The first is timbral: while the quartets' ever-changing dramatics make it challenging to ''resonate'' with the solo instruments in a string quartet, the collective sound of the orchestra adds a new dimension to the music. The other approach was to incorporate Leo Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata into Janacek's music of the same name, and thereby introduce a new form of drama. In his quartet, Janacek does not follow the storyline of Tolstoy's novella as closely as Arnold Schoenberg once did with his musical setting of Richard Dehmel's poem, Verklarte Nacht. However Janacek's writing brings on intense emotions with strong linguistic and theatrical gestures, which, in my opinion, would be further reinforced in direct connection with the novella. Tentatively, we introduced a selection of quotes from the novella in our concerts and this eventually led to the idea of developing a radio drama performance. In this arrangement, the quartet's four movements are performed in their entirety, ''strategically'' positioned in four crucial points in the story, while parts of the music also serve as a dramatic foundation for the text. In the process of text adaptation, the novella's plot and emotional aspects were given priority over its philosophical considerations.

Georg Druschetzky is a name that people who know their music history associate with charming but innocuous wind partitas and truly out-of-the-ordinary concertos for six, seven, or eight timpani and orchestra. The latter category comes as no surprise; after all, Druschetzky was an “Upper Austrian Regional Timpanist” (a title actually bestowed on him in Linz in 1776), and so why shouldn’t he offer compositional tribute to his instrument? But there’s more: Druschetzky enjoyed a successful career that took him all the way to the court of the Palatine of Hungary, Archduke Joseph von Habsburg, in Ofen (today’s Buda), where he held the posts of court composer and music director and wrote masses, symphonies, two operas, and numerous chamber compositions. His chamber works include a cycle of ten oboe quartets (1807-8) from his late years that make an astonishing and lasting listening impression – because of his rich imagination and his compositional wit and spirited harmonic daredevilry that we otherwise encounter only in the “surprise artist” Haydn. This discovery is so significant that we in any case intend to present all ten quartets in congenial recordings by the Grundmann Quartet on historical instruments. The present release is volume 1 in this project.

Recorded following an acclaimed solo concert tour, renowned performer, composer and conductor Thomas Adès performs a collection of Leos Janácek’s works for piano. Nearly all of the music for solo piano written by Leoš Janácek (1854-1928) dates from before the First World War and thus belongs to the period before the composer’s remarkable late creative surge, which was triggered by the hugely successful 1916 production in Prague of his third opera, Jenufa (1894-1903; rev. 1907-8), and facilitated by his retirement from his teaching position at the Brno Organ School. Nevertheless, all three of Janácek’s major solo piano works – On an Overgrown Path (1900-1911), From the Street 1 October 1905 (1905-6) and In the Mists (1912-13) – contain music that is both profoundly individual and also integral to the now widespread view of the composer as one the most original musical voices of early twentieth-century music.

REVIEWS:

Adès’s account of On an Overgrown Path eschews sentimentality and refuses to duck the suppressed violence that occasionally erupts. His care shown over Janácek’s inner part writing is often revelatory, and he seems very much at one with the near improvisatory nature of these pieces. There is perhaps less delicacy in his approach to the more elusive soundworld of In The Mists, but his performance is impressive for its clarity and cohesion.

– BBC Music Magazine

It’s apparent from the get-go that Adès is determined to check all expressive clichés at the recording studio door, accept Janácek’s plain-spoken syntax and lack of artifice for what they are, and simply play the music straight. Adès seems less interested in colour or moody subtext than rendering text with intensive clarity in the two-movement Sonata. An illuminating release.

– Gramophone