Vladimir Jurowski’s all-Czech programme with the LPO, devised to mark the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Czechoslovakia as an independent country, contained only one established repertory piece, Janáček’s Sinfonietta. Jurowski’s spacious, wonderfully secure performance of it provided a suitably brassy conclusion to what was after all, a celebration. But what had come before it – scores by Gideon Klein, Erwin Schulhoff and Bohuslav Martinů – was anything but familiar.
Taken together in such exemplary Jurowski performances, the three works offered a revealing cross-section of Czech music before and during the second world war. All of them took neoclassicism, the prevailing European doctrine of the inter-war years, as their starting point, though Klein had no chance to reach maturity as a composer; he was only 25 when he was killed early in 1945 after being sent to Auschwitz. His Partita for strings, an arrangement by Vojtěch Saudek of a string trio composed in the Terezin concentration camp in 1944, uses Moravian folk tunes, and the result sounds rather like some of Bartók’s folk transcriptions, or perhaps his string divertimento.
The Schulhoff and Martinů pieces were both concertos for the unusual combination of string quartet and orchestra, which were premiered within a few months of each other in 1932. Comparisons between the two are inevitable. Schulhoff’s “orchestra” is a wind band, and the tangy, acerbic textures show his musical allegiance to Hindemith and Kurt Weill. With the quartet always used as a single unit, the effect is of two musical engines chugging along in parallel and just occasionally generating some piquant dissonances; a brief jazzy episode in the finale hints at the wider Weimar republic context in which the concerto was composed.
Martinů’s concerto was written in Paris, though, and seems a much more relaxed, loosely lyrical affair. The solo quartet certainly has much more expressive freedom than it’s ever allowed in Schulhoff’s motoric textures, and since the Borodin Quartet were the soloists with Jurowski and the LPO that was probably a good thing – they found real profundity in the way in which the central slow movement builds to a huge climax, a sudden definitive change of mood in a work that otherwise is often hard to pin down.
