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Post by Uncle Henry on May 22, 2016 14:50:06 GMT -5
Bohuslav Martinů was born in the Bohemian market town of Polička in 1890. Until the age of twelve he lived with his family in a church tower. Therein he was dissimilar from Baron Britten who lived in an old mill that he purchased in 1937 with money inherited from his mother and made a thing of. Martinů left his native land in 1923, and thenceforward resided in Paris, the northern American States (which, unlike Schönberg and Shtrafinski he correctly found uncongenial), and Switzerland. He was a very prolific composer; in that, and in his motor rhythms, rivalling Bach, almost. His boyhood in the tower, he said, affected him in later life. Compositionally he strove (according to Mr. Smaczny in Grove) to embody in his work the space constantly before his eyes as a child; as a man, the isolation may well have contributed to the elusive quality of his personality and a tendency to disorientation when first encountering new places. Here we see a performance of his Sinfonietta "La Jolla" for small orchestra with pianoforte, composed in 1950, and catalogued by Halbreich as number 328. Why it is called "La Jolla" is a mystery; perhaps one of the members of the forum will be able to provide enlightenment. The players are the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, with Cédric Pescia performing on the pianoforte and Joshua Weilerstein doing the conducting. Click HERE to see the performance. The duration is just twenty-two minutes, and the file size just 386,695,861 bytes.
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