Chamber Music +

Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959) "A system of uncertainty has entered our daily life. The pressures of mechanization and uniformity to which it is subject call for protest and the artist has only one means of expressing this, by music." 1942 – Bohuslav Martinů composed his First Piano Quartet. It would be nice if we could extend the line of tradition in a simple, straightforward way between Dvořák and Martinů – both came from peasant Czech origins; both studied in the organ school at the Prague Conservatory; Dvořák’s student Josef Suk was one of Martinů’s first teachers. But Europe’s musical map (let alone its socio-political map) had changed too much in the intervening years due in large part to the search for new melodic and harmonic resources that had begun in the romantic era.

Nikolai Kapustin Piano Quintet, Op. 89 Nikolai Kapustin (b. 1937) once wrote, "In the early '50s jazz was completely prohibited, and there were articles in our magazines that said it was typical capitalistic culture, so we have to throw it away and forget about it." With occasional respites, this situation lasted well beyond the Stalin years into the Krushchev and even Brezhnev regimes.