Czech Songs

These wonderful songs, by composers hailing from what is now the Czech Republic, span the years 1876 to 1943, from high-Romanticism to music of unsettling, almost disorienting Expressionism. In this live recording, mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená combines crystal-clear diction and emotional depth, while the Czech Philharmonic under Simon Rattle brings every detail of these beautiful, often subtle scores to irresistible life. We begin in the perfumed world of Bohuslav Martinů. With more than a passing nod to Debussy and Ravel (also inspired by the Far East), Martinů sets a selection of brief Japanese poems for his 1912 song cycle Nipponari. His use of modal harmonies alongside woodwind and harp paints impressions of Japanese traditional music as well as Japan itself, a land that 20th-century European audiences would have regarded as exotic, even shrouded in mystery. Songs on One Page, the briefest of pieces that would each have been printed on one side of paper, date from Martinů’s enforced period of exile in the US during World War II. Setting Moravian poetry, each song is akin to a postcard back home, and embraces a variety of emotions from tongue-in-cheek wit (“Otevření slovečkem,” Track 9) to heartfelt passion (“Cesta k mile,” Track 10), and sheer joy (“Chodníček,” Track 11). From Martinů we plunge into the rich, burnished Romanticism of Dvořák, the folk-inspired and often intensely beautiful Evening Songs and Op. 2 Songs bursting with nostalgia, and sharing much of the orchestral language found in the composer’s final three symphonies. The two remaining composers on this wide-ranging album were both imprisoned in the Terezín concentration camp, where the arts were used by the Nazis as propaganda to trick the outside world. Hans Krása, who was deported to Terezín in 1942, composed his Four Orchestral Songs in 1920, the angular music by turns ethereal, mournful, even agonized. Gideon Klein composed his Lullaby in 1943 in Terezín itself, a brief and touching work of great beauty. Klein was to die just two years later, in Auschwitz.