Jirí Belohlávek's live 2009 set of the six symphonies of Bohuslav Martinu marked the 50th anniversary of the composer's death, as commemorated by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a series of concerts at London's Barbican. At once ingratiating and enigmatic, magical and urbane, Martinu's symphonic cycle is a substantial body of work that should be more popular with audiences. The atmospheric orchestration, the lively rhythmic impulse, the elastic melodic designs, and the harmonic ingenuity of the music bring immediate pleasure ...
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Jirí Belohlávek's live 2009 set of the six symphonies of Bohuslav Martinu marked the 50th anniversary of the composer's death, as commemorated by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a series of concerts at London's Barbican. At once ingratiating and enigmatic, magical and urbane, Martinu's symphonic cycle is a substantial body of work that should be more popular with audiences. The atmospheric orchestration, the lively rhythmic impulse, the elastic melodic designs, and the harmonic ingenuity of the music bring immediate pleasure and communicate wondrous images and emotions. Yet the symphonies also seem difficult to pin down, because Martinu's originality -- not quite post-romantic, not quite neo-classical -- seems to have sprung from a personal development that doesn't fit with received notions of European modernism. These works are also profoundly unfamiliar to most listeners, another reason for their strangeness. The relative scarcity of recordings has seriously delayed Martinu's acceptance in the west,...
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