Leoš Janácek

Schubert may have had rotten luck in love, but Romantic composer Leosˇ Janácˇek had him beat. The Czech spent more than a decade desperately and fruitlessly wooing his muse, Kamilka Stösslová. Proof that brokenhearted pining can spark creativity, this period powered the most extraordinary compositions of Janácˇek’s career. After completing operas such as The Cunning Little Vixen and two great string quartets, Intimate Pages and the Kreutzer Sonata, he introduced his luminous Sinfonietta in 1926—which he dedicated to Stösslová, 35 years his junior—just two years before he died.

In recognition of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra’s Czech roots (the orchestra was formed in 1946, mainly from German musicians expelled from Czechoslovakia during WWII), Jonathan Nott conducts a program of Janácˇek’s best-known orchestral works. They present the Sinfonietta in all its ebullient glory; the five cyclic movements, each designed to portray the character of the newly formed Czech Republic, reveal Janácˇek’s art at its most sophisticated. Just as the composer intended, the orchestration is grand and colorful while retaining the leanness that makes it so absorbing.

Janácˇek’s first orchestral masterpiece, Taras Bulba, written in 1918 and named after Nikolai Gogol’s novella, receives similarly splendid treatment. The BSO’s versatile and athletic lyrical sound proves as compatible with Janácˇek as it did with Schubert and Mahler. After the splendor of these works, the final suite from The Cunning Little Vixen, arranged by conductor Frantisek Jilek, could be in danger of feeling tacked on. Luckily, it doesn’t. The shift of energy simply provides gilded edging, reminding us of the complex, flexible and passionate nature of this most captivating, if somewhat sexually pathetic, composer.

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