Exile and exaltation

​​​​★★★★★

It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve been waiting for this album for half my adult life. The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu is a taste I acquired in my 30s. As fertile as Mozart and no less melodic, Martinu published 400 works and always knew when to stop. None of his major works is one note loo long. Each symphony bears his wry, wistful signature theme, as distinctive a sound as any composer who ever put pen to stave. Like B-a-c-h and D-s-c-h, Martinu laid his identity on the line. In the first symphony it strikes the ear in the opening bars.

Composed in wartime America, four symphonies follow the struggle between good and evil, two in nail-bitten frustration, the next two in hope of liberation. The fifth symphony permits a measure of exaltation. The sixth sits on the French Riviera, mourning the Soviet occupation of his homeland. As a cycle, it is a graphic musical record of the second world war and its consequences, seared by restrained anger, eased by musical balm. Martinu is as important ear on history as Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams

You won’t find Bohuslav Martinu in the classical charts. He does not do big gestures or mass-stringed hysteria. His orchestral music is civilised and exceptionally well-made, as well as sensuous and stimulating. If I have a favourite symphony it is probably the fourth, but I can be swayed towards the austere first or the more languorous sixth. Listening does not have to be sequential. Dip in and out. You may have to listen a bit harder than with, say, Prokofiev, but it’s worth it.

I first heard the symphonies in a 1988 Neeme Järvi set, performed with the Bamberg Symphony, an orchestra originally composed of post-1945 Czech-German refugees. Järvi, an Estonian, had a huge repertoire and, though committed, did not sound much more fluent in this language than I was. There was another set by Jiri Belohlavek with the BBC Symphony, where the orchestra response failed to match the conductor’s fire. Here Jakub Hrusa, Belohlavek’s star pupil, conducts the authentic Bamberg Symphony and the results are transformational. I have listened three times, so far.

This set has authority and advocacy, passion and penetration. Consumer warning: it is not for all tastes. If you somehow find yourself resistant to the Largo of the third symphony or the closing pages of the sixth, you should probably find another hobby, or a consultant otolaryngologist. No harm done. But if you make only one investment this year in music you don’t already know, trust me: make it this album.