Bohuslav Martinů - Early Orchestral Works Vol. 2 (Ian Hobson)

Information

Composer: Bohuslav Martinů

• Stín (‘The Shadow’) – Ballet in One Act, H 102

Dorota Szczepańska, offstage soprano (2, 19)
Anna Maria Staśkiewicz, violin (4-6, 12, 17)
Agnieszka Kopacka, piano

Sinfonia Varsovia
Ian Hobson, conductor

Date: 2016
Label: Toccata Classics
https://toccataclassics.com/product/martinu-early-orchestral-v2/

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Review

PERFORMANCE: **** / RECORDING: *****

The Martinů revival enjoyed a serious boost with the release of the Smetana Trio’s complete recording of the Piano Trios. For those who are still feeling their way towards a joined-up understanding of the composer’s character – or characters, plural – from passing familiarity with his mature operas and symphonies, Ian Hobson and Sinfonia Varsovia’s world premiere performance of The Shadow offers further insight into the composer’s developing voice and magpie ear.

Writing in 1958, Martinů was dismissive of his 1916 one-act ballet, and of the artist Alois Kohout’s libretto – a hack-Symbolist fantasy of a twilight encounter between Death and a pubescent maiden. The core sound is unmistakably Czech, with a tang of Suk in the blissed-out divisi strings, and although there are traces of Impressionism in the eddying figures for harp and celesta, the loudest external voices are those of Beethoven and, in the swooning waltzes, Richard Strauss.

It is juvenilia but it is attractive juvenilia, with an enigmatic, wordless offstage melody for soprano Dorota Szczepańska. The most arresting individual performances come from pianist Agnieszka Kopacka and violinist Anna Maria Staskiewicz. Sinfonia Varsovia play with spirit and engagement under Hobson, their string sound pure and direct in all but the highest passages.

-- Anna Picard, BBC Music Magazine

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Bohuslav Martinů (December 8, 1890 – August 28, 1959) was a Czech composer of modern classical music. Martinů began as a violinist of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. In the early 1930s he found his main font for compositional style, the neo-classical as developed by Stravinsky. With this, he expanded to become a prolific composer, who wrote almost 400 pieces, included 6 symphonies, 15 operas, 14 ballet scores and a large body of orchestral, chamber, vocal and instrumental works. He is compared with Prokofiev and Bartók in his innovative incorporation of Central European ethnomusicology into his music.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohuslav_Martin%C5%AF

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Ian Hobson (born 7 August 1952 in Wolverhampton) is an English pianist, conductor and teacher, and is a professor at Florida State University. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music, Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Yale University in the United States. His teachers included Claude Frank, Ralph Kirkpatrick and Menahem Pressler. Hobson won silver medals in the Arthur Rubinstein and Vienna-Beethoven competitions and first prize in the 1981 Leeds International Pianoforte Competition. He has performed in many countries with many orchestras, frequently conducting from the keyboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hobson
https://www.ianhobson.net/

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