KOZELUH KNOBLOCHOVA; SEMERADOVA; FLEKOVA SONATAS FOR FORTEPIANO, FLUTE AND CELLO

R. STRAUSS Violin Concerto. 1 1 KORNGOLD Violin Concerto 2 • Pavel Šporcl (vn); Ji?í Kout, cond; Prague SO • SUPRAPHON 3962 (58:24) Live: Prague 6/24/2008; 1 10/8-9/2008 2


Pavel Šporcl, according to the notes, seems to be a sort of Czech Nigel Kennedy: a sort of rock star of the violin (he plays a blue one, made by the Czech Jan Špidlen in 2005, which, the booklet specifies, has been protected by Communitary design No. 673157 (if Stradivari or the Amatis, Guarneris, Guadagninis, or Gaglianos had similarly protected their designs, we all might be playing violins shaped like cigar boxes, unless box manufacturers had protected that geometric pattern, too, as a communitary design).


Richard Strauss’s early Violin Concerto languished for many years, with few recordings (the first I heard, that by my teacher, Carroll Glenn, with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, didn’t seem to realize the Concerto’s bravura style). The CD era has been kinder to the work, including readings by Sarah Chang on EMI 568702, 23:5, Ingolf Turban (Claves 50-9318, 17:3), Boris Belkin (London 436 415, 17:4), and Xue-Wei (with Christopher Headington’s Concerto, ASV 780, 15:4). Vlasta Reittererová’s informative and highly readable notes suggest that Sarasate’s unwillingness to take it up may have been a blow to its very early acceptance; it’s easy to hear how that violinist might have sparkled in some of its passages, so similar to those of Bériot and Vieuxtemps. Šporcl, had he been alive at the time and so inclined, might have done yeoman service to the piece. His flourishing entry in the first movement (which establishes at once his committed championship), his command of both the technical and lyrical passages, and not least, his close collaboration with Kout and the Orchestra (who strut and swagger through the movement), lend his reading a flamboyance that Sara Chang’s seems, perhaps only by comparison, to lack (as, to an even greater degree, does Xue-Wei’s). Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein had a way of playing less than first-rate works with the same authority they brought to masterpieces, and Šporcl, at least in this case, demonstrates a similar ability, or at least dedication (he even plays an occasional portamento that fits the Concerto’s rather old-fashioned ambiance). Soloist and Orchestra create a calm interlude in the slow movement, to which they bring refined and hushed sensibility that reveals the poignancy beneath its somewhat placid surface. Šporcl adapts himself to the finale’s mercurial changes, the mix of elfin brilliance and affecting cantabile relieved by an episode of cocky posturing.


There’s been no paucity of recordings of Korngold’s ingratiating Concerto; and among even the most recent of which (not to mention Itzhak Perlman, Gil Shaham, and Anne-Sophie Mutter), readings by James Ehnes (CBC 5241, 32:3), Nikolaj Znaider (RCA 710336, 32: 6), and Philippe Quint (Naxos 8.570791, 33:2) could offer for some an alternative to Heifetz’s white-hot Romantic early versions (the notes make it clear that although Korngold conceived the Concerto for Bronislaw Huberman, Heifetz spurred him to complete it and gave its premiere). Unlike Strauss’s Concerto, therefore, Korngold’s made the most auspicious entry on the musical scene, and began its life on disc with a blockbuster recording. Kout and the Orchestra realize the Concerto’s cinematic sweep; and although Šporcl plays with an opulent ebb and flow in the first movement, he doesn’t recreate Heifetz’s sense of urgency (he’s more achingly lyrical than Znaider or Quint), at least until the very end. In the slow movement, Šporcl pierces the Orchestra’s nebulous haze with thrilling tonal command and evident sympathy for the style. The engineers transmit the score’s timbral nuance, helping clinch the musical argument, even in moments of relative stasis toward the movement’s end. As throughout the recording, they’ve achieved an almost perfect balance of soloist and orchestra. If Šporcl doesn’t at first carry the listener along with him in the finale’s main theme, he manages to serve as a foil for the orchestra’s bumptious jollity; and he blazes through the solo’s intricate thematic elaborations. But Šporcl doesn’t ignore the strain of modernity underlying the genial consonance, and his reading brings the movement closer to the thumping finale of Prokofiev’s Second Concerto than listeners might have suspected had been possible.


Despite the great number of cogent performances of Korngold’s Concerto, Šporcl’s coupling with a bracing version of Strauss’s should appeal strongly to collectors of all kinds. Recommended across the board.


FANFARE: Robert Maxham


"Well first of all I’ve always tried to play as best I could, but I thought of doing the violin concert business in a little bit different way than usual, so I decided not to play in tails, I played in just a shirt and trousers and wore a bandana around my head. And I tried to be as close to the young public as possible. I wanted to show them that a young person can also play classical music, and that they don’t have to be apprehensive about going to the concerts or about listening to classical music. And I think that’s what made the difference. Now I don’t play in a bandana any more, but I have a blue violin. Again, it’s a thing with which I try to change the classical scene a little bit in my own way. And I think that’s the thing that makes me different, that’s what I want to do."

[Pavel Šporcl, in an interview with Prague Radio, see http://www.radio.cz/en/article/114634]

Remind you of anyone? Perhaps some of the influence of Aston Villa FC’s most famous supporter, currently resident in Kraków, Poland, has seeped across the border into the neighbouring Czech Republic ...

Thankfully, though, apart from commissioning that trademark blue violin, Šporcl has so far avoided the personal excesses that brought Nigel Kennedy so much criticism (in 1991, for example, the then Controller of BBC Radio 3 John Drummond referred to him as "a Liberace for the Nineties" and attacked his "ludicrous clothes and grotesque, self-invented accent”.) So how does Šporcl fare in what he calls the “violin concert business”?

Interest in Korngold’s music has increased considerably in the past forty years and the violin concerto, initially derided as a Hollywood-derived potboiler, is now one of the best known of the composer’s works. Hence the Czech enters an increasingly competitive field.

You might assume, from the soloist’s own words, quoted above, that his might be a crowd-pleasing, superficial account. But in fact he gives us a perfectly respectable, if at times rather saccharine, performance. Just the opening few minutes give a good indication of what is to come, with Šporcl offering a far more dreamy and ruminative interpretation than can be heard on the benchmark Heifetz recording - still sounding very good for its age. It is all actually rather beautifully done and, if you are used only to the much more direct and driven Heifetz interpretation of the concerto, that may come as something of a surprise. The first two movements are especially successful with that approach but Šporcl is winningly vivacious, too, in the lively finale, where the interplay with the orchestra is particularly nicely constructed.

The Strauss concerto is a teenage composition, written, unsurprisingly, before the composer had found his distinctive musical voice. It has never really established itself in the regular repertoire. Strauss himself was eventually quite dismissive of it, remarking that “no one should have written a thing like that after Brahms”. But, putting the composer’s reservations about style to one side, the “thing” is nevertheless a more than competently written work that deserves an occasional outing.

Pavel Šporcl is clearly committed to giving it his best and his performance here is a most enjoyable one. Once again, he is slightly less direct and fleet of foot than some of his competitors. Thus, while Ulf Hoelscher (Staatskapelle Dresden/Rudolf Kempe, 1976) brings the first movement in at 14:58 and Xue-Wei (London Philharmonic Orchestra/Jane Glover, 1991) at 14:57, Šporcl takes 15:39. The tendency is even more marked in their respective timings for the presto finale - 7:48, 7:37 and 8:54. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this new and distinctive account very much.

I do, though, have a slight reservation regarding the acoustics of the Smetana Hall in Prague. While the recorded sound is certainly pleasantly warm, it is also rather resonant and so, while the soloist is very well recorded, the last degree of clarity within the orchestral ranks is sometimes lost. The audience’s response to these live performances is enthusiastic, all the same, as, on the whole, is my own.

-- Rob Maynard, MusicWeb International

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensemble: Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor: Karel Ancerl.

"The quality of the 10 orchestral pieces assembled on the three-CD Supraphon set of Kalabis reissues has to be heard to be believed, the more so since the music itself is rarely encountered in the concert hall, outside the Czech Republic, at least. But these three discs have more than their fair share of masterworks. If I were coming to Kalabis’s music with innocent ears, it would take only the opening of the Second Symphony of 1959–61 to convince me that I was listening to a major symphonist. The opening Andante moderato generates a sense of powerful foreboding which is released with terrific force in the Allegro molto e drammatico that follows in what one is beginning to recognize as one of Kalabis’s typical manically striding marches. The brooding slow movement, an Andante marked molto quieto (the work was composed at the height of the Cold War) again builds up the tension, dispersed this time in a gloriously long-legged fugue which gradually expands into a gloriously dignified Finale. The First Violin Concerto (1958–59) lies somewhere between Martin? and Shostakovich, perhaps closer to the latter, and is hardly inferior to either, with a bristlingly energetic opening movement, a dark and troubled slow movement (marked angoscioso ) with spiky and assertive central section, and a buoyant but sober Finale. The first disc closes with the 13-minute Symphonic Variations for Large Orchestra (1964). If the Dvorak Symphonic Variations were more often performed, I would recommend resting that score for an occasional hearing of Kalabis’s tightly argued and absolutely unsentimental score—but even the Dvorak rarely gets a look-in these days, so I fear there’s little hope of hearing the Kalabis live, more’s the pity.



The second disc opens with the Concerto for Large Orchestra, commissioned by Karel An?erl for the Czech Philharmonic and composed in 1965–66, which begins with one of Kalabis’s fiercest dissonances, but it’s one of those dense agglomerates which suggests resolution and, sure enough, an arching violin line emerges and purifies the air and, almost before we know it, we’re off on another of Kalabis’s white-knuckle allegro s; Kalabis described the middle movement as a “tragic meditation”; and the freewheeling Finale has something of the ferocious energy of the last movement of Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Sixth Symphony, though Kalabis pauses for air rather more often. In contrast to the four-movement Second, the Third Symphony is in three movements, another of Kabalis’s galloping allegro s bookended by two uneasy essays, predominantly but not always slow and, as ever, with Kalabis, powered even at moderate tempos by the sense that there’s energy in plenty waiting to be given its head. Volume 2 ends with Kalabis’s Trumpet Concerto of 1973. R?ži?ková, who provides the booklet notes for the set, explains that, exceptionally, Kalabis was allowed to accompany her on a tour of France that year and, in a little town in Provence, he was given a statuette of the town crier, whose adventures the music depicts (hence the title, “Le Tambour de Villevieille”). Cast in two movements and 18 minutes long, it moves as easily as the other works here from knockabout vigor to anxious inaction. The drums that are occasionally heard in the first movement are, briefly, more prominent in the second and sound as if they are about to set up a tattoo but the music then sets off in a different direction. I find this work slightly less personal than the other pieces on offer here, but Kalabis’s craftsmanship is as evident here as elsewhere, and there aren’t so many good trumpet concertos in the world that trumpeters can afford to ignore this one.


Kalabis’s Harpsichord Concerto, composed in 1974–75 (no prizes for guessing who the dedicatee and first performer was), has something of the buoyancy of the Poulenc Concert champêtre and the angularity of neo-Classical Stravinsky—but far more of a sense of onward drive than either composer; indeed, it’s in the driving rhythms of the Finale that Kalabis comes closest to Martin? though, unsettlingly, it then subsides into anguished silence. R?ži?ková complained to her husband, only half-joking, that “You have let me die”; but the times in which it was written, he responded, did not permit another ending. Martin? was tangentially involved in the birth of the work, as R?ži?ková relates in her notes. She was performing the Martin? Concerto in Switzerland and the conductor asked if by chance she had heard of a Czech composer called Viktor Kalabis; much laughter ensued, and a commission soon after that. But don’t expect some maudlin love-letter: Kalabis obviously wanted to show the world what she could do, and the solo part is a demanding one; the piece is almost half-an-hour in length, too, which must make it one of the world’s longer harpsichord concertos. The second work on the third, all-concerto, disc is the Second Violin Concerto of 1977–78, performed by the much-missed Josef Suk, with whom R?ži?ková formed a duo in 1963, so it is good to see him represented here and find him in stellar form. Just over a quarter-hour in length, it’s in a single movement, as are the 22-minute Concerto for Piano and Winds (1985) and the 12-and-a-half-minute Concertino for Bassoon and Winds (1983)—the most explicitly Stravinskian works in this collection. All three are tightly argued, the first two earnest and generally grave in manner, with the Concertino exploiting the capacity of the bassoon to suggest boisterous and slightly preposterous good humor, though there are also a number of passages of almost hieratic starkness.


The performances throughout make the case for the music as convincingly as you could ask. The recordings were made between 1968 and 1991 and have come up well. A few slips from the soloist in the Trumpet Concerto suggested it might be a live recording, a suspicion confirmed by the subsequent applause; a cough and the occasional noise serve the same function in the Bassoon Concertino.


Altogether, this is an excellent survey of some of the major works of one of the major voices of recent times. Taken together with the MSR box (if you do not know the Fourth Symphony, you should not let yourself live in ignorance of it much longer), it should help Kalabis’s name before a Western public, even if it’s largely the small part of it that buys recordings. Bit by bit, one hopes, some of Kalabis’s oeuvre might begin to appear in concert, where audiences will cheer it to the rafters. In the meantime, I urge you to acquire this box and do some hollering at home."


FANFARE: Martin Anderson

Viktor Kalabis (1923-2006), one of the most distinguished figures of 20th-century Czech music, wrote dozens of opuses, mainly instrumental pieces, including for his wife, the world-renowned harpsichordist Zuzana Ružickova. As he himself put it, his aim was to create music rooted in his country, music for educated listeners. Although he also drew inspiration from 20th-century classics, Kalabis arrived at a synthetic style of his own, an alternative to the rational compositional techniques – a Neo-Romantic alternative, akin to Neo-Classicism. Besides the first ever album of Kalabis’s complete piano oeuvre, Ivo Kahanek and other leading Czech instrumentalists have recorded the composer’s three sonatas. The one for cello reflects the dramatic events in Czechoslovakia between June and September 1968: the months of euphoria of the Prague Spring, followed by disillusionment and resignation in the wake of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion, which for two decades to come would numb all hopes of freedom. The clarinet sonata (1969) too clearly refers to the time of its coming into being: drama, grief and sorrow, escalated into harrowing helplessness. The elliptical and coherent violin sonata (1982) places emphasis on the instrument’s typical ethos – melodiousness, bright sound and soulfulness. After 3 albums featuring Kalabis’s symphonies and concertos, the present recording affords yet another insight into the composer’s musical universe.

Miloslav Kabelac (1908-79), a highly original and individual musical thinker, enjoyed considerable renown during the 1950s and 60s as the leading Czech composer of his generation. However, around 1970 he apparently offended the powers that were, and his many recordings and publications disappeared. Now, after more than two decades of what seemed to be total obliteration, Kabelác's music has, during the past year, made its first appearances on CD, mostly with reissue of broadcast performances from his period of prominence. For comment on those releases, together with further background information, see Fanfare 17:2, pp. 280-81, and 17:3, pp. 214-15. In both those reviews I cited The Mystery of Time as perhaps Kabelác's most distinctive and compelling work, in urgent need of representation on disc. And now its sole previous recording returns to the catalog, bringing to eight the number of works by this composer currently available, although only one is a newly recorded performance.

The Mystery of Time, composed in 1957, is a work of tremendous power and originality. In some ways it is comparable to the Sinfonia Sacra of Andrzej Panufnik, although its aesthetic impact is quite different. But it shares with the Polish work a number of characteristics, among them a ready accessibility, despite the renunciation of most traditional formal and harmonic procedures, and of the sophisticated nuances, embellishments, qualifications, and other devices associated with “expressive“ music. There is little sense of vulnerable humanity in Kabelác's music—of a subjective point of view. Rather, it seems to suggest an impersonal landscape, governed by a supreme order far removed from the judgments or concerns of living creatures. The Mystery of Time represents Kabelác's unusual metaphysical attitude in its most fully and successfully realized manifestation, conjuring the vast expanse of time that stretches from the infinite past to the infinite future, its unwavering forward momentum suggesting the inexorable motion of the heavenly bodies.

The form has been described as a sort of passacaglia, but only in a loose sense: It is not based on contrapuntal development over a recurring bass line, but it does involve a gradual accumulation of energy through the evolving development of simple motivic elements. The work begins with an ominous murmur strongly reminiscent of the opening of Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony (which dates from the same year), with regard to both mood and actual content. Basic, elemental intervallic material is introduced into a static void, slowly building momentum through a process of imperceptibly altered repetition that must be described as proto-Minimalist. The effect suggests the implacable passage of time viewed from the perspective of a dispassionate eternal consciousness. With great deliberateness the twenty-five-minute work gradually builds in intensity through motivic metamorphosis and interlayered levels of rhythmic acceleration in a grim, inexorable crescendo that eventually culminates in a revelatory cosmic orgasm, before finally returning to the static void.

Karel Ancerl was a close friend of Kabelac and a consistent champion of his music, introducing The Mystery of Time throughout Europe and even in the United States. This recording dates from 1960, and the performance is sympathetically conceived and solidly executed. Of course, a new recording, in modern sonics, would be most welcome, but this reissue provides a valuable opportunity to discover one of the most unforgettable European works of the mid-twentieth century.

Hamlet Improvisation was composed in 1963 and represents a later development in Kabelác's musical language—more terse, angular, dissonant, and gestural—but with much the same underlying metaphysical outlook. The title is enigmatic, as the work has no improvisational elements and its connection with Shakespeare's play or the hero thereof is tenuous at best. The composer's own explanation suggests the obfuscatory philosophical doubletalk that passed for musical commentary in Eastern Europe during the Soviet period. However, the piece, in which angry, dissonant passages alternate with moments of eerie mystery, might have been less misleadingly entitled Contrasts for Orchestra or some such. It make a strong impact as an abstract statement and is another of Kabelác's most important works. This is music of far greater competence and depth than that of other figures from Eastern Europe who have momentarily seized the popular fancy.

With Hamlet Improvisation we have the unlikely case of two currently available recorded performances, each conducted by Ancerl. The other recording (Praga PR 255 000) is taken from a live performance in 1966; this new Supraphon reissue is from a studio recording made the same year and is much better.

- Walter Simmons, Fanfare

Miloslav Kabeláč (1908-1979) was one of the finest of modern Czech composers whose music is virtually unknown to concert-goers in North America. His music has an introverted sense of focus and even urgency, modern yet expressidly romantic and in sheer craftsmanship, has been compared to the works of his countrymen Antonín Dvorák and Bohuslav Martinu.- Supraphon

Alongside Bohuslav Martinu, Miloslav Kabeláč was unquestionably the greatest Czech symphonist of the 20th century. The first complete recording of his symphonies, made by the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marko Ivanovic, affords the listener the opportunity to revel in the sheer depth of Kabelác’s symphonic oeuvre. The first complete recording of Miloslav Kabeláč’s symphonies is a gateway to new musical landscapes. - Supraphon

Bach saved my life... You always feel in his music that God is present somehow. This is not empty declamation. It is a deep confession of harpsichord player Zuzana Růžičková, a survivor of the inconceivable horrors of the Nazi concentration camps of Terezín, Auschwitz and her Bergen-Belsen. She always felt that Bach's music was one of the things that helped her survive. In a certain way this is also true the other way around: Zuzana Růžičková gave new life to Bach's music by persistently promoting the use of harpsichord (as opposed to commonly used piano) in performing Bach repertoire in concert. She was the very first person to initiate the gigantic project of recording the complete harpsichord concertos composed by Bach. This project included the Supraphon recording she made with conductor Václav Neumann and their ensemble at teh unsettled time of the Prague spring of 1968 and the subsequent invasion of the Soviet Army into Czechoslovakia. "The sessions had to be interrupted due to the occasional crack of gunfire or the rumble of tanks passing by the Rudolphinum." One thus might be tempted to label the recording "a historical document" and put in the archive drawers.

Classical Music

DVORAK; SUK; JANACEK; SMETANA; JEZEK; MARTINU; GRIEG; SCHUMANN;RESPIGHI; BRAHMS; SCHUBERT; DEBUSSY; POULENC; FRANCK; MOZART;HONEGGER; KODALY SUK (VIOLIN); HOLECEK, PANENKA, HALA (PIANO), SKAMPA (VIOLA);NAVARRA (CELLO) JOSEF SUK: EARLY RECORDINGS- ROMANTIC PIECES FOR VIOLIN AND PIANOOP. 75; FOUR PIECES FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO, OP. 17; SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO; SONATINA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO IN D MAJOR, OP. 137 NO. 1; SONATINA FOR VIOLIN AND CELLO; ETC.

Josef Suk began writing the funeral symphony Asrael to commemorate his teacher and father-in-law Antonín Dvořák. During the course of work, however, Fate dealt him another crushing blow: Asrael, the Angel of Death, took away Suk’s wife and Dvořák’s daughter Otilie. The symphony is a story of a suffering whose strength seems simply unendurable, yet also a story of its overcoming, seeking solace and hope. Sir Charles Mackerras’s live recording of Asrael originated on a Good Friday, 6 April 2007, one hundred years after the symphony’s premiere. The young Australian conductor had first heard about Asrael some sixty years previously from Suk’s close friend, Václav Talich. In later years, Mackerras confessed that he perceived the work in a completely different light after his daughter had died. Sir Charles conducted Suk’s Asrael during one of his last performances with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. It is also his last previously unreleased recording with this orchestra.