Janácek: Chamber Works (2014)

None of the music on this album is terribly frequently played, at least outside the Slavic countries, and all of it falls outside the primary nationalistic thrust of Janácek's music. Yet there is a thread tying together all the music of this Czech giant, and even among the early works on the program, which date back to the composer's student years in the 1870s, he is recognizable. Those works -- the student exercise Znelka I (meaning "sonnet" or "sonata"), the Suite for string quintet (1877), and the Idyll, for strings ... Read More

None of the music on this album is terribly frequently played, at least outside the Slavic countries, and all of it falls outside the primary nationalistic thrust of Janácek's music. Yet there is a thread tying together all the music of this Czech giant, and even among the early works on the program, which date back to the composer's student years in the 1870s, he is recognizable. Those works -- the student exercise Znelka I (meaning "sonnet" or "sonata"), the Suite for string quintet (1877), and the Idyll, for strings (1878) -- reflect the natural influence of Dvorák but already evince an individual voice. The Suite is particularly interesting in that it represents an experimentation with Baroque forms (albeit imperfectly understood); it has the mixture of dry counterpoint and humor that marks so much of Janácek's lighter music. The Idyll, though suite-like in structure, falls into a broader vision of Romantic nationalism; it is an appealing work that could be programmed with any number of Romantic... Read Less