- Naxosdirect.com

The Leading Classical Music Label Direct To You

Read reviews, listen to the music, and purchase the

Customer Service Toll Free 866.489.4152

Flash 9 required. Click to download.

Narrow your search
with our Music Browser

Classical Music

        Ballet
        Chamber Music
        Choral
        Concertos
        Film Music
        Folk Legends
        Instrumental
        Musicals
        Opera / Operetta
        Orchestral
        Vocal

Jazz

Jazz Contemporary
Jazz Icons

New Age

Wind Band

World

        Ballad
        Bhuddist
        Chinese Music
        Classical (World)
        Early Music (World)
        Folk
        Gamelan
        Gypsy
        Hindustani
        Jazz (World)
        Klezmer
        Sufi
        Vocal (World)
        World

Special Offers:

Sale on select Chandos titles

Sale on select BBC Legends Items

Naxos Classics Clearance Sale

Sale on select Naxos American Classics

Sale on Charles Dickens DVD Box Set

Sale on select box sets

Clearance on Complete Beethoven Edition

Sale on the Jazz Icons Series

Clearance

Penguin Guide

200 Essential Recordings

Recently Released

Upcoming Releases

SACD

DVD

        Ballet DVD
        Classical Concert
        Classical Documentary
        Dance Documentary
        Opera DVD

Audio Books

        Anthologies / Collections
        Arts
        Biographies
        Children's Classics
        Classic Fiction
        Great Epics and Tales
        History
        Junior Classic Fiction
        Junior History
        Literature
        Music Biographies
        Music Education
        Non-Fiction
        Philosophy
        Plays - Others
        Plays - Shakespeare
        Poetry
        Religion
        Samplers
        Sports
        Wine Guide

NaxosDirect Podcasts

Video Librarian Reviews

Labels

Naxos Label

        Naxos American Classics
        Naxos Best Of...
        Naxos Box Sets
        Naxos Cinema Classics
        Naxos Classics
        Naxos DVD
        Naxos DVD-Audio
        Naxos International
        Naxos Jazz
        Naxos Limited Edition
        Naxos Milken Archives
        Naxos Night Music
        Naxos Opera
        Naxos Orchestral
        Naxos Special Release
        Naxos Wind Band Classics
        Naxos World

Composers

Conductors

Ensembles

Orchestras

Choirs

Artists

Instruments

Producers

Home

Classical Music

Chamber Music

$0.00

This item is not currently available.

This item is currently out of print.

Link to this Link to this page

Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959) Works for Cello and Piano, Volume 2 The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů was born in 1890 at the country town of...

Read more about this recording

Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959)

Works for Cello and Piano, Volume 2

The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů was born in 1890 at the country town of Polička in the mountains of Bohemia and Moravia. His father, a shoe-maker by trade, was employed also as town watchman, living in the bell-tower of the church of St Jakob, the highest vantage-point in the town, with the task of keeping Polička from any recurrence of the fire that had devastated it earlier in the century. It was here that Martinů was born in 1890. In his childhood he learned the violin from a local tailor and made a local reputation for himself, giving his first public concert in his home�town in 1905. At the same time he made his first untutored attempts at composition. It was through the generosity of some of the citizens of Polička that in 1906 he was able to enter the Prague Conservatory. There, however, he found the routine of the Violin School irksome and was consequently transferred in 1909 to the Organ School, where he again failed to distinguish himself. Expelled in 1910, he remained in Prague, now concentrating on composition and narrowly qualifying as a teacher.

During the war Martinů taught the violin in his home-town, avoiding military service, for which he was medically unfit, and in 1918 he was able to join the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, where he broadened his musical experience while continuing to compose work after work.

At the Conservatory he had enjoyed a brief period of instruction from Josef Suk but in 1923, assisted by a scholarship, he moved to Paris to study with Albert Roussel.

In the following years Martinů's music began to gain a hearing internationally and at home. By 1931, still in Paris, he had established himself well enough to marry a young dressmaker, although he never earned enough to allow even reasonable comfort. The German invasion of Czechoslovakia and the annexation of the country in 1939, coupled with the threat of wider conflict, was both horrifying and alarming. Eventually, in June 1940, four days before the German capture of Paris, Martinů and his wife made their escape, finding their way with considerable difficulty to Portugal and thence to Bermuda, to reach New York at the end of March 1941. In America during the war there were commissions from various quarters, notably from the Koussevitzky Foundation, for which he wrote his First Symphony.

After the war Martinů had hoped to return to Prague, where he had been offered the position of professor of composition at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. His return to Europe was delayed by illness, after a fall at Tanglewood, where he had been invited to lecture, and any possibility of working again in hi, home-country was obviated by the accession to power of the Communists in 1948. For some five years he remained in the United States as professor of composition at Princeton, returning to Europe in 1953. Until 1955 he lived in Nice, then moving to Philadelphia to teach at the Curtis Institute for a year, before taking up a position at the American Academy in Rome. After a further period in Nice, he spent his last years in Switzerland, where he died of cancer in 1959.

was enormously prolific as a composer, often seeming careless of the fate of what he had written. He tended to avoid revision of his compositions and in consequence the vast quantity of music that he wrote is often of uneven quality and varying style, although he came, in the 1930s, to make increasing use of Czech thematic material and to be identified with his native country. Nevertheless there were influences to be absorbed in Paris during the seventeen years he spent there.

Uneasy at first in New York, on his first arrival in America, Martinů and his wife eventually settled in Jamaica, on Long Island, where they enjoyed the friendship of a Czech cellist, Frank Rybka, and where Martinů set about the task of learning English. There were commissions from Paul Sacher which led to his Concerto do camera and from Mischa Elman for a Violin Concerto. His Variations on a Theme of Rossini was written in 1942 for the Russian-born cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. A call to attention from the piano is followed by the well-known theme. The first variation has triplet rhythms divided between cello and piano, moving on to a version of the material in shorter note values. There is a certain respite in the third variation, with its sudden shift of tonality, after which the piano leads the way to the energetic fourth, with its rapid conclusion. After this the theme returns in more solid form.

Martinů wrote his Variations on a Slovakian Theme in March 1959 at Pratteln in Switzerland, where, now seriously ill, he was a guest of Paul Sacher and his wife. The folk-song Kde bych ja veděla ('If I had known') provides the theme, heard from the cello after the short piano introduction. The syncopations of the first variation and the intensity of its central section are followed by a version that makes use of a repeated rhythmic motif and double-stopping. The third variation opens with solemn piano chords, followed by the cello in melancholy intensity, the fourth variation offering a contrast as a scherzo, before its final rhetoric. The set ends with a vigorous final derivative of the theme, now with asymmetric rhythms, in true Slovak style.

The remaining works here included were written in Paris in 1930. The six Pastorales open with a meditative Andante, leading to a second piece of cheerful energy, episodes framed by its principal theme. Staccato piano chords accompany the sustained cello melody of the third piece, as it slowly unwinds and the fourth again offers a contrast in its onward impetus. It is left to the cello to introduce the fifth Pastorale in dramatic recitative, and the last of the set is characteristic in its rhythmic drive.

The Nocturnes are described as four pieces for cello with piano accompaniment, asymmetric in the rhythm of the first piece. The second, marked Lento, proceeds to a passage of cello chords, after the opening chords of the piano. A tender melody lies at the heart of this night-piece, before the return of the figuration of the opening. The third piece is equally evocative in its sustained melodic writing for the cello and the fourth opens with the plucked notes of the cello, before the forward impetus of the bowed passage that follows. The plucked notes of the opening return in conclusion.

Effective use is made of the open strings of the cello in a deceptively convincing first piece in the Suite Miniature of easy pieces. There are fingered notes in the second piece, which makes no great technical demands on a performer. A livelier third movement calls for a degree of agility and a fourth elicits a singing tone from the cello. The fifth makes use of repeated melodic formulae, the sixth is a whimsical Allegretto and the whole work ends with a movement that makes effective use of scale patterns.

Keith Anderson

Disc 1

Variations on a Theme of Rossini, H. 290

(more info)

Composed by: Bohuslav Martinu
Conducted by: Christian Benda
Huw Watkins,
Guido Schiefen, cello
Olaf Dressler, fortepiano
Paul Watkins, cello
Sebastian Benda, piano

Theme: Poco allegro - allegro moderato - 1:10
Variation I: Poco allegro - 1:00
Variation II: Poco piu allegro - 1:48
Variation III: Andante - 3:15
Variation IV: Allegro - 0:53
(Theme): Vivo - Moderato maestoso - 1:06

Variations on a Slovak Folksong, H. 378

(more info)

Composed by: Bohuslav Martinu
Conducted by: Christian Benda
Huw Watkins,
Paul Watkins, cello
Sebastian Benda, piano

Theme: Poco andante, rubato - 2:04
Variation I: Moderato - 1:14
Variation II: Poco allegro - 1:35
Variation III: Moderato - 2:26
Scherzo, Allegretto - 2:16
Variation V: Allegro - 1:17

6 Pastorales, H. 190

(more info)

Composed by: Bohuslav Martinu
Conducted by: Christian Benda
Sebastian Benda, piano

I Andante - 6:25
II Allegretto moderato - 2:19
III Adagio - 6:49
IV Moderato - 2:37
V Largo - 6:05
VI Allegretto - 3:14

4 Nocturnes, H. 189

(more info)

Composed by: Bohuslav Martinu
Conducted by: Christian Benda
Sebastian Benda, piano

I Andantino moderato - 3:09
II Lento - 8:00
III Moderato - 3:36
IV Allegretto moderato - 1:58

Suite miniature, H. 192

(more info)

Composed by: Bohuslav Martinu
Conducted by: Christian Benda
Sebastian Benda, piano

I Moderato - 1:22
II Poco andante - 2:07
III Poco moderato - 1:12
IV Andante - 1:57
V Poco allegro - 1:21
VI Allegretto - 1:13
VII Moderato - 1:19

Reviews

Be the first to review this title

FREE SHIPPING on orders
of 5 items or more!

Earn Naxos Rewards Points by opening an account and buying your favorite music today! Create your account here.

See all of our great site features here.