Smetana & Novak - CD

ENGLISH

ADD<br> <br> My Country by Bedřich Smetana (1824 - 1884), which ranks among the very cornerstones setting the trend of the history of the genre of symphonic poem, had its precursors in the production of tone poems dating from the composer´s stay in Sweden. Encouraged by Liszt, on whom he had called in Weimar, Smetana decided to venture into the territory of compositional work inspired by literary models. As regards subject matter, the trio of his "Swedish " symphonic poems displays an exciting degree of variety: whilst Richard III deals with the bloody drama set at the English royal court, and Wallenstein´s Camp depicts a day and night in a military campaign, Hakon Jarl delivers the portrait of a legendary Norwegian warlord, based on the work of Danish playwright Adam Oehlenschlager. Smetana wrote these three works within the decade between thirty and forty years of age, by then fully capable of producing thoroughly original monolithic works characterized by masterly orchestration and distinct motivic treatment, qualities which have turned all three works into staple, timeless repertoire numbers of major symphony orchestras worldwide. The South Bohemian Suite of Vítězslav Novák (1870 - 1949) mirrors the composer´s profound fondness of his native region, in a moment of personal introspection and reminiscence afforded by the leading spirit of modernism in Czech music, at a time of looking back, in the late 1930s, on his life as a composer and man. The way in which the artistic message of this music was grasped, in his time in the 1940s, by then thirty-year-old promising conductor Rafael Kubelík (1914 - 1995), can now be witnessed from this reissue of vintage recordings, immaculately updated with the use of state-of-the-art studio technologies. Slogan: Kubelík at 30, conducting Smetana and Novák.