Bohuslav Martinu: Piano Quintets Nos. 1 & 2, Piano Quartet No. 1

“It was not what touched people directly, their worries, joys and sorrows, that I could perceive from that distance – or rather, from that height; it was much more the vastness, the boundless expanse that always stretched at my feet and to the horizon. This I have tried to express in my music.” With this sentence Bohuslav Martinů, who grew up as the son of a turret in the East Bohemian provincial town of Polička, once formulated his artistic credo

Everything had begun well: In 1906, the music lovers of his hometown pooled their money to finance the highly gifted 16-year-old’s music studies at the Prague Conservatory. But he thanked them badly for their generosity: after four years he was expelled from the conservatory for “incorrigible carelessness”. Laziness, however, was never one of Martinů’s traits; rather, it may have been an early manifestation of his nonconformism that drew the ire of the academic authorities towards the twenty-year-old. Nevertheless, two years later he was granted a diploma as a violin teacher and the Czech Philharmonic took him on as a substitute violinist

In 1923 he moved to Paris. The French metropolis became his new home, which he had to leave in 1940, fleeing from the advancing German troops; his adventurous journey to the USA lasted nine months, where he finally found refuge. Here he composed two of the three works on this CD, the Piano Quartet and the Second Piano Quintet (the first Piano Quintet had been written entirely under the spell of jazz in Paris in 1933). The warlike conflicts are not reflected in this chamber music, which knows nothing of the wild goings-on of the world around it and follows the laws of its own beauty with grace, verve and spirit.