Tag Archives: Bohuslav Martinů

In concert – Inmo Yang, CBSO / Dima Slobodeniouk: Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky & Martinů

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Inmo Yang (violin), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Dima Slobodeniouk (above)

Martinů Memorial to Lidice H296 (1943)
Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D, Op. 35 (1878)
Prokofiev Symphony no.6 in E flat minor Op.111 (1945-47)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thursday 18 June 2026 2:15pm

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Picture of Dima Slobodeniouk (c) Marco Borggreve

If not quite an all-Russian sequence or, indeed, one centred on the Second World War, this was still a cohesive and satisfying programme that played to the collective strengths of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra along with this afternoon’s conductor Dima Slobodeniouk.

Just over eight decades since a first hearing in Prague (83 years following its premiere in New York), Memorial to Lidice has lost little of its fervency and pathos – qualities often present in the music of Martinů’s maturity yet seldom so graphically as here. The CBSO’s playing duly ensured a performance of sustained eloquence, with Slobodeniouk lightening the mood in its central section so that the return of the opening music – with its allusions to the St Wenceslas Chorale and the motto of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – left a tangibly cathartic impression.

Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto received a far less cordial reception at its premiere in Vienna, but soon afterwards established a place in the repertoire as has never been challenged. Early audience may have found its first movement protracted, but Immo Yang ensured a seamless follow-though with due characterization of its subtly contrasted main themes. Imaginatively articulated, the cadenza was pointedly developmental as to make the wistful reappearance of the first theme the more affecting. Nor was there any lack of emotional depth in the ensuing Canzonetta – its musing uncertainty the counterweight to a finale which, after its (rightly) jarring introduction, found the right balance between impetuosity and plaintiveness on route to a coda no less uproarious for all its knife-edge coordination between soloist and orchestra.

Acclaimed at its Leningrad premiere, Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony was a victim of political intrigues such as hampered any wider dissemination (its first hearing in Birmingham came as late as 1980) or recognition as its composer’s finest and most finely achieved such piece. Slobodeniouk undoubtedly had its measure, not least that opening Allegro moderato whose diverse and even disparate ideas – which might be described as speculative, mesmeric then desperate – melded with an assured sense of where this disquieting movement was headed. In particular, the lengthy development proceeded with truly remorseless intensity toward a pulverizing climax – one whose bitter after-tones persisted through a summary reprise then on to a conclusion whose embrace of the major key could hardly have felt less affirmative.

If this movement finds Prokofiev at his most questing, then the Largo finds him at his most empathetic such as its searing introductory bars then heartfelt main theme are drawn into a powerfully focussed design leaving no doubt as to its composer’s awareness of the ‘human cost’ or this conductor’s conveying of what was at stake. Not that the final Vivace was at all pre-empted, the forced jocularity of its main theme offset by ambivalent episodes prior to a coda whose teetering on catastrophe seemed hardly allayed by those fateful closing gestures.

Taken as a whole, this proved an impressive conceived and realized performance that, having occurred ‘‘many years since my last visit’’ (to quote the conductor), was such as to make one hope that Slobodeniouk’s next appearance with this orchestra might not be so long in coming.

To read more about the CBSO’s 2026/27 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the name to read more on conductor Dima Slobodeniouk and violinist Inmo Yang

Published post no.2,925 – Monday 22 June 2026

In Concert – Michael Collins & Wu Qian @ Wigmore Hall: Finzi, Martinů, Milhaud, Tailleferre & Arnold Cooke (reviewed online)

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Michael Collins (clarinet, above), Wu Qian (piano, below)

Finzi 5 Bagatelles Op.23 (1920-9)
Martinů Sonatina for clarinet and piano (1956)
Milhaud Duo Concertante Op.351 (1956)
Tailleferre Arabesque (1973)
Cooke Clarinet Sonata in B flat (1959)

Wigmore Hall, London
Monday 9 March, 1.05pm

Reviewed from the online broadcast by Ben Hogwood Photo of Michael Collins (c) Jack Lewis Williams

This was the first public appearance for Michael Collins and Wu Qian as a duo, yet together – on BBC Radio 3’s Lunchtime Concert at least – they displayed an easy familiarity, suggesting a partnership of a longer vintage.

They began with five much-loved miniatures from Gerald Finzi, often heard in isolation on rival radio stations. Collins and Qian enjoyed the bustling counterpoint of the outer Prelude and Fughetta movements, but the emotional heart of the set lay in the lovingly phrased Romance and Forlana, whose lilting rhythms were persuasively played, and the solemn Carol. The downbeat mood, inhabited from wartime struggles, was especially pertinent, though the Fughetta gave the music renewed energy in this performance.

Martinů’s Clarinet Sonatina is a late work, completed during a brief second stay in New York. The Czech composer was used to relocating at short notice on account of Nazi invasions of his homeland and Paris, but this brief second trip to America was an ultimately unsuccessful career move. The Sonatina inhabits the composer’s restlessness, looking longingly across the Atlantic towards Paris. This was captured by Collins and Qian in the bare piano octaves and reflective melody of the Andante, while the finale found greater conviction of feeling.

While Martinů pined for the French capital, Darius Milhaud was writing his Duo Concertant as a competition piece for his Paris Conservatoire students. Milhaud rarely outstays his welcome, and the piece was wrapped up with typical humour and a heartfelt central episode, gracefully played. Meanwhile the Arabesque of Milhaud’s fellow ‘Les Six’ member, Germaine Tailleferre, was a softly undulating dance that proved restrained yet elegant.

The English composer Arnold Cooke acquired a continental edge to his music thanks to a period of study with Paul Hindemith in the 1920s. His compositions for clarinet were written for Franz Reizenstein, also a pupil of Hindemith, and include a concerto and quintet. The airy first movement of the Clarinet Sonata in B flat – written deliberately without major or minor key labelling – was similarly elusive, its questioning line thoughtfully phrased by Collins in a satisfying balance with Qian.

The strident second movement is laced with humour which Collins was keen to bring out, before a probing slow movement with private asides from the clarinet hints at darker thoughts, particularly in its low burbling notes from the instrument near the end, suggesting a watery contemplation. The Finale swept these thoughts aside, making demands on Collins’ agility with the wide range of its thematic material, common across the work. The music dipped and weaved its way through a number of entertaining figures, plumping resoundingly for the major key in a hugely satisfying coda.

You can listen to this concert on BBC Sounds until 9th April.

Published post no.2,824 – Monday 9 March 2026

In concert – The London Chorus and New London Orchestra / Adrian Brown: VE Day 80th Anniversary Concert @ Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square

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Petroc Trelawny (orator), The London Chorus, New London Orchestra / Adrian Brown

Vaughan Williams Six Choral Songs (1940)
Martinů Memorial to Lidice (1943)
Walton Spitfire Prelude and Fugue (1942)
Bliss Morning Heroes (1929-30)
Holst/Rice I Vow to Thee My Country (1921)

Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square, London
Thursday 9 May 2025

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

The London Chorus and New London Orchestra have put on notable concerts in recent years, few more ambitious than this programme to mark not merely the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day but also the 50th anniversary of Sir Arthur Bliss’s death in appropriate manner.

The first half comprised an unlikely but effective sequence of pieces written at the start of or during the Second World War. Rarely revived as such, Vaughan Williams’s Six Choral Songs to be Sung in Time of War works well as a whole: settings of Shelley that touch on aspects of courage, liberty, healing, victory, then pity, peace and war – before A Song to the New Age characterizes its utopian leanings in subdued and even ambivalent terms which seem typical of its composer. Suffice to add that the London Chorus had the full measure of its aspiration.

Two succinct if otherwise entirely different pieces brought out the best from the New London Orchestra. Rarely so overt in emotion, Martinů was well-nigh explicit when commemorating Nazi atrocities in music of plangent harmonies and chorale-like fervency both evocative and affecting. Derived from his score to the film The First of the Few, Walton had come up with a showpiece whose ceremonial prelude is vividly countered by its incisive fugue – making way for a brief if poignant interlude before matters are brought to a head in the rousing peroration.

Although intimately bound up with the First World War, Morning Heroes is wholly apposite for the present context. Conceived as the exorcism of his wartime experiences, Bliss’s choral symphony elides deftly between a distant past and its present; the first of its five movements featuring an orchestral introduction to set out the underlying mood and salient motifs, before Hector’s Farewell to Adromache had Petroc Trelawny eloquently evoking that scene on the ramparts of Troy without excess rhetoric. Adrian Brown’s understated direction meaningfully pointed up the expressive contrast between this and The City Arming – the setting of Walt Whitman whose interaction of chorus and orchestra was powerfully sustained right through   to the simmering unease at its close, with the onset of hostilities in the American Civil War.

The two parts of the central movement saw each section of the London Chorus come into its own: the women in Vigil, a confiding take on lines by Li-Tai-Po (Li Bai) such as relates the emotions of those left behind; and the men in The Bivouac’s Flame, plangently evoking life at the front with further lines from Whitman’s Drum Taps. Choral forces reunite in Achilles Goes Forth to Battle, a setting from later in The Iliad which brings about the work’s climax via The Heroes – a rollcall commemorating those of Antiquity. After this, the starkness of Wilfred Owen’s Spring Offensive is the greater for its sparse accompaniment – Trelawny’s oration a model of understatement as this segued into the setting of Robert Nichols’s Dawn on the Somme with those ‘morning heroes’ themselves evoked affirmatively if fatalistically.

A concert which ended in fine style with Holst’s stirring anthem had begun in subdued fashion with Dawn on the Somme – Ronald Corp’s elegy, given hours after his death was announced. Someone who had always given his all to this chorus and orchestra, he will be greatly missed.

Ronald Corp OBE (1951-2025)

Published post no.2,530 – Sunday 11 May 2025

In concert: Pavel Haas Quartet at Wigmore Hall – Suk, Martinů & Korngold

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Pavel Haas Quartet [Veronika Jarůšková, Marek Zwiebel (violins), Šimon Truszka (viola), Peter Jarůšek (cello)]

Suk Meditation on an old Bohemian Chorale (St Wenceslas) Op.35a (1914)
Martinů String Quartet no.2 (1925)
Korngold String Quartet no.3 in D major Op.34 (1944-45)

Wigmore Hall
Monday 12 June 2023 1pm

by Ben Hogwood

An unusual and intriguing program from the Pavel Haas Quartet contained music by two fellow Czech composers (Suk and Martinů) and one (Korngold) born in Moravia before moving to America.

The quartet began with a moving piece by Suk, his Meditation on an old Bohemian Chorale (St Wenceslas). This poignant pre-war utterance carried an air of deep profundity right from the first phrase of Simon Truszka’s viola, its elegiac tone enhanced by relative lack of vibrato. The air of solemnity carried throughout, though there was considerable strength in depth as the music grew in stature.

Though a Czech composer, Martinů spent a good deal of time overseas – largely out of necessity. By his early 30s he was in Paris, studying with Roussel, bringing a neoclassical language and tidiness to his music. The String Quartet no.2, though, is a curiously lopsided work, very front heavy with its first movement a combination of substantial slow introduction and quick section. There were close links to the St Wenceslas Chorale here, too, found in the solemn intonations of the Andante. This was the spiritual heart of the piece, dark and uncertain at times and contrasting greatly with the thoughtful but lightly coloured manner in which the quartet began. A resolute first movement found a mood that Martinů reprised in the closing Allegro, a propulsive dance number with a spring in its step. There was an undeniable French flavour to the music here, which the Pavel Haas Quartet brought forward, its elegance at odds on occasion with the rustic dance tunes.

There was tension in the final work, too, though this was undeniably the making of a mature composer. The String Quartet no.3 was Erich Korngold’s last published chamber piece, adjacent in publication to the Violin Concerto, with which it shares the same key of D major. The Pavel Haas Quartet gave a superb account of the piece, exploring its unusual musical language through music that would have presented considerable technical challenges.

The awkward but compelling violin melody in the first movement was brilliantly negotiated by Veronika Jaruskova, who conveyed its uncertainties through sweet tones and phrases. In spite of a convincing and full bodied outburst from all four players, the movement was dominated by this figure, which left a question in the mind. The Scherzo went some way to answering this, a black and white film scene easy to conjure up in the mind as the furtive darting of the main theme ensued. Again this was brilliantly played, as was the heart melting trio, its big tune (from the recently completed score to Between Two Worlds) full of tender longing and given appropriate glissando for expression.

The silvery slow movement flickered in the half light like a candle burning low, but with the flame essentially undimmed. The quartet’s sense of purpose was key here, with burnished lower string tones as viola and cello often combined, a notable cushion on which the searching violin melodies (using material from The Sea Wolf) could rest. Romance was in the air but although some of the music was borne of Hollywood, its intimate confines gave the music a deeply personal air. The atmosphere was heightened as a thundercloud hovered over the Wigmore Hall.

The motorised finale brought conviction and a strong sense of homecoming, not dissimilar to its equivalent movement in the Violin Concerto. Although emphatic in its resolution there were moments where the quartet moved into a different tempo or unexpectedly distant harmonies, Korngold momentarily distracted by edgier thoughts until his focus returned.

The Korngold string quartets have had something of a renaissance of late, with several new recorded versions and a marked increase in performance. On this very cultured evidence it would be no surprise if the Pavel Haas Quartet committed their version to disc soon – but it is to be hoped the other works will join it, for this was a fine concert indeed.

For more livestreamed concerts from the Wigmore Hall, click here

Online Concert: Tine Thing Helseth & Kathryn Stott @ Wigmore Hall

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Tine Thing Helseth (trumpet), Kathryn Stott (piano)

Nordheim Den første sommerfugl (1982)
Martinů Sonatina for trumpet and piano (1956)
Shostakovich 4 Romances on Poems by Alexander Pushkin Op. 46 (1936-7)
Piazzolla Café 1930 from Histoire du Tango (1986)
Grieg 6 Songs Op. 48 (1884-8)
Gershwin Prelude No. 2 in C sharp minor (c1923-6); By Strauss (1936)
Weill Youkali (1934)
Kreisler Toy Soldiers March (1917)

Wigmore Hall, Monday 6 March 1pm

by Ben Hogwood

What a joy to see the partnership of trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth and pianist Kathryn Stott renewed at Wigmore Hall, united in an original program of trumpet originals and imaginative arrangements from vocal sources.

Dreamy lines from the piano introduced the concert’s first item, Arne Nordheim’s Den første sommerfugl (The First Butterfly), full of spring promise as the insect’s flight gracefully orbited the hall. Helseth’s trumpet line was a lyrical one, speaking faintly of folk song. From here the pair moved straight into the compact and winsome Sonatina for trumpet and piano, one of the Czech composer Martinů’s miniature gems. Written while experiencing homesickness in New York, the work began with a gruff introduction from the piano, its repeated note figurations taken up by the trumpet in fanfare-like salvos generating a good deal of energy. Gradually this subsided into more poignant thoughts, the composer revealing his softer centre, and by the bittersweet chorale with which the work ends the sense was that of a composer looking for his fortunes to change. Both performers caught that shift of focus.

Next up was an imaginative choice, an arrangement of Shostakovich’s Four Pushkin Songs. The vocal lines transfer to the trumpet with surprising accuracy, both artists playing in such a way that the original spirit of the songs was fully maintained. Regeneration, the first song, was thoughtfully done, held notes on the trumpet carrying above delicate figuration on the piano. Premonition was an easy amble in triple time, but the fourth song, Stanzas, held the cycle’s emotional centre. A substantial song, as long as the other three combined, it began with a stern introduction from Stott before a compelling dialogue unfolded.

Complementing this was a beautifully floated account of Piazzolla’s Café 1930, tastefully augmented by Stott’s rhythmic attention to detail. The melodies really sang from Helseth’s trumpet, any breathing challenges overcome with deceptive ease. As she said at the end, a bit of Piazzolla is never wrong!

Helseth’s announcements between the groups of pieces were nicely done, with an easy charm that also showed how much the two artists were enjoying themselves. This much was clear again in six songs by Grieg, grouped together as Op.48 but once again transcribing with relative ease for the trumpet. Gruss (Greeting) featured a lovely depiction of bells, an outdoor scene, while Lauf der Welt was a rustic march. Helseth’s characterisation of Die verschwiegene Nachtigall (The secretive nightingale) was nicely done. Zur Rosenzeit (Time of roses) presented bright colours, while the final Ein Traum (A dream) was especially full of feeling.

We moved to a stylish Gershwin duo, starting with an account of Prelude no.2 that was especially enjoyable when the main theme returned with the mute in the trumpet. By Strauss was also a highlight, enjoying the Viennese waltz send-up, while Weill’s Youkali was a soave tango. Finally Kreisler’s Toy Soldiers March was a perky account, led off by the piano with crisp fanfares. Topping a highly enjoyable concert was an encore of Piazzolla’s Libertango, led off with a swing by Stott and played with great panache by Helseth, including pitch slides to perfection.

For more livestreamed concerts from the Wigmore Hall, click here