Catching Up on “Slipped” CDs

Apparently, I let the recent Deutsche Grammophon album of the complete symphonies by Bohuslav Martinů “slip through the cracks” (so to speak). Fortunately, today is a relatively quiet day, allowing me all the time I need to make up for my negligence! Martinů composed six symphonies, and they all fit on three CDs. The compositions do not have opus numbers. Instead, they have catalog numbers with the prefix “H,” whose initial refers to the Belgian musicologist Harry Halbreich. Closer to home, so to speak, two conductors of the Boston Symphony Orchestra promoted these symphonies in the programs they prepared. Those conductors were Serge Koussevitzky and Charles Munch.

Jakub Hrůša on the cover of his album of Martinů’s symphonies (from the Amazon.com Web page for this album)

Thus, it may be the case that this is the first time that the Czech composer Martinů is being represented under the baton of a Czech conductor on a recording. Jakub Hrůša was born in Brno and studied at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Nevertheless, the orchestra he is conducting on this album is the Bamberg Symphony in Germany. Furthermore, that ensemble has impressive history, summarized in a paragraph from its Wikipedia page:

The Bamberg Symphony was founded in 1946 by musicians who as a result of the Beneš decrees had been driven out of Bohemia, Moravia, the Czech Sudetenland as well as from German cities and had ended up in Bamberg. The "core" of the orchestra comprised former members of the German Philharmonic Orchestra Prague. The first concert of the orchestra was performed on March 20, 1946, in Bamberg. In July 1946, the orchestra was renamed the „Bamberg Symphony“ (German: Bamberger Symphoniker).

In other words, the ensemble was one of the first cultural institutions to emerge from World War II. One of the objectives of the Allies in that War was the liberation of Czechoslovakia from occupation by Adolf Hitler. Fortunately, Martinů had left his native land in 1923 and never looked back. In both the Twenties and the Thirties, he was exposed to a wide diversity of genres and explored all of them with enthusiasm. He was  just as fortunate to leave Europe in 1941, where all six of his symphonies were performed by (in the words of his Wikipedia page) “all the major US orchestras.”

1946 was also the year of my birth. However, I did not become aware of Martinů until I was in my twenties. That meant that my undergraduate years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took place a little over a year after Munch handed the baton for the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) over to Erich Leinsdorf. Nevertheless, I am pretty sure that I was able to see Munch at least once in a guest appearance on the BSO podium.

To be fair, none of that background had much influence on my knowledge of Martinů’s music. His name was familiar, but he was seldom encountered not only in the concert hall but also on the radio. (By way of “confession,” I do not think I ever played any of his music when I was working at the MIT campus radio station!) As a result, my “serious listening” of Martinů’s symphonies was deferred until this month, when I listened to Hrůša’s album to acclimate my listening capacity to the composer’s rhetorical twists and turns.

Given the length of this article, I would say that my experiences could not have been more positive. Ironically, when I first started listening to that album, I was also drawn to the other “complete” recording I have of Jiří Bělohlávek conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. I have to confess that it has been a long time since I last listened to that album. This is probably just as well, since I was able to take Hrůša’s interpretations strictly on their own terms.

By all rights, this should be a wake-up call to pay more attention to Martinů. The fact is that those six symphonies amount to the tip of an iceberg. Here is a more complete summary from his Wikipedia page:

Martinů was a prolific composer who wrote almost 400 pieces. Many of his works are regularly performed or recorded, among them his oratorio The Epic of Gilgamesh (1955, Epos o Gilgamešovi), his six symphonies, concertos (these number almost thirty – four violin concertos, eight compositions for solo piano, four cello concertos, one of each for harpsichord, viola, and oboe, five double concertos, two triple concertos, and two concertos for four solo instruments and orchestra), an anti-war opera Comedy on the Bridge (Veselohra na mostě), chamber music (including eight string quartets, three piano quintets, a piano quartet), a flute sonata, a clarinet sonatina and many others.

The good news is that the chamber music recital by members of the San Francisco Symphony included the nonet he composed in 1959, but that performance took place over a year ago at the end of April, 2025!