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This week Mahlerman brings us four great, and perhaps surprising, Bohemian composers…

If you believe that music can express a national identity, then perhaps the greatest concentration of it in the 19th and 20th Century was in Bohemia and Moravia – today the Czech Republic. Save in his passionate cycle of symphonic poems Ma Vlast (My Country), we hear very little these days from the father of Bohemian music, Bedrich Smetana, who absorbed the folk influences of his country and transformed them into an altogether more profound art form, an art form that found its ultimate expression in the figure of Gustav Mahler (another Bohemian) who, in the early 1900’s was creating a bridge that would eventually lead to what we now call modernism.

The obvious successor to Smetana was his near contemporary and neighbour Antonin Dvorak, and it is not difficult to understand the continuing popularity of his music, suffused as it is with light and sunshine. He wrote in every form imaginable and, by some magic that is quite hard to grasp, he manages a fresh and mellow countenance in almost every bar, along with a clean, logical harmony, and an almost unmatched gift for melody. Last year we dipped into his marvellous F Major Quartet, ‘The American’ (unselfconsciously called ‘The Nigger’ when I was a child); today, the great slow movement from his E Minor Symphony that was purloined by Ridley Scott to make a Hovis ad’ forty years ago, here sung as ‘Goin’ Home’ not by the sonorous bass of Paul Robeson, who made a corner of the piece, but by the bass-timbred baritone of the great actor/singer Lawrence Tibbett.

Believing, as he did, that the wellspring of musical creation was the sound of the natural world in his native Moravia, it is hardly surprising that speech, birdsong, or the whistling of the wind feature in almost all the music of Leos Janacek. So distinctive is the soundworld he created that a single bar is enough to identify anything he wrote. It would be misleading to suggest that his compositions are sophisticated – if anything the harmonies sound unusual, he can be repetitive, and upon first acquaintance, you cannot be quite sure what is coming next. However, what does come next is certainly not naive, and when your ear becomes adjusted to the distinctive palette of colours, it is clear that here is music of extraordinary originality and power. The marvellous operas were virtually unknown outside Czechoslovakia fifty years ago; today, Jenufa, Katya Kabanova, The Cunning Little Vixen and other magical scores are the staples of opera houses around the world. I would urge dabblers to hear his two great solo piano cycles, ‘In The Mists’ and ‘On An Overgrown Path’, as these masterful miniatures offer a fine introduction to Janacek’s unique voice. Today we get two Czechs for the price of one, in this short excerpt from the Prague choreographer Jiri Kylian’s ballet based around Janacek’s great festive fanfare from 1926, Sinfonietta. It remains the apotheosis of his al fresco style.

When Viktor Ullmann was gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, along with his wife and son, he had already completed a substantial body of work, some of which survived his murder. Born a Jew in Teschen, Silesia in 1898, he had come into contact with Gustav Mahler’s circle of influence, and studied with Alexander von Zemlinsky, another Jew (as was Mahler), and later with music’s great bogey-man, Arnold Schoenberg. A hastily arranged third marriage in 1941 kept him out of the Lodz Ghetto, but a year later he was deported to Theresienstadt, Here, he somehow managed to produce a stream of wonderful compositions, including the one act chamber opera The Emperor of Atlantis. Even in this short, intense extract, filmed inside Auschwitz, it is clear what the world lost with his passing.

Born in the bell-tower of the church of St James in Policka, Bohemia in 1890, Bohuslav Martinu spent the first dozen years of his life looking down on the world from the top of its 193 steps. It marked his life and, more particularly, his music, and he later spoke of this ‘space, that I always have in front of me’. We can hear this Laputan breadth of expression in most of his great music – all six symphonies, the last a true masterpiece; the bleak Memorial to Lidice, and the early Field Mass. I was travelling across Europe to Dresden with a youth orchestra as a teenager, and when we stopped for a break in Halle, we all trooped into a record shop to mooch about. It was here that I first heard the amazing Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano & Timpani, and like the other nerds around me, we were completely bowled over by this striking sound. I bought the scruffy Supraphon record and treasure its weird piano interludes and elegiac sentiment to this day; for me it represents the lingua franca of this unique Bohemian magician. Here is the sinuous heart of the work, the central slow movement.