Karel HUSA (1921-2016)
Symphony No 2 ‘Reflections’ (1983) [18:39]
Three Frescoes (1946-47) [25:08]
Music for Prague 1968 (1969) [24:05]
Prague Symphony Orchestra/Tomáš Brauner
rec. 2020/2021, Smetana Hall of the Municipal House, Prague
SUPRAPHON SU4294-2 [68:12]
This year (2021) is the centenary of Karel Husa’s birth and Supraphon’s compact tribute naturally features his best-known work, Music for Prague 1968, though fortunately in the orchestral version, not the more commonly encountered original version for wind ensemble. This ensures that the recording has greater cachet in the marketplace, a feeling intensified by the fact that the Three Frescoes is heard in its complete, world premiere recording.
The visceral impression generated by Music for Prague, 1968 - its seismic disquiet, its eruptive anger, even the seemingly
consoling birdcalls in the opening section’s Introduction and Fanfare (on the piccolo) – hardly lets up during the whole course of its four movements. Husa’s arresting sonorities are just as evident in this orchestral version, though the brass original, because of the instrumentation, invariably seems to generate a more immediate martial sense of outrage and opposition. Nevertheless, Tomáš Brauner and the Prague Symphony
Orchestra deliver incremental tension and the recording gives due prominence to the percussion in the Interlude third movement, where the atmosphere is spectral but the tenor of the music is seething. The famous Hussite chorale Ye Warriors of God and His Law, an age-old symbol of resistance in the Czech Lands, which has appeared sporadically earlier in the work, reappears in the finale but is never heard in full. Husa’s boldness regarding extremes of tempo and dynamics is evident in this performance and indeed in its recording balance.
Symphony No 2 is subtitled Reflections and was composed in 1983. Despite its classic Honegger-like three movement form – Honegger remained an important influence on Husa – the orchestration, conjunction of sonorities, and use of percussion are all definitive features of the Czech composer’s musical arsenal. Husa also allows the music a Moderato opening movement followed by an abrasive, edgy very fast central one in which there is a frantic kind of brilliance and an edge-of-the-seat intensity. The finale is slow and here the music’s expressive weight falls most richly. But even here the percussion, a character in its own right, evokes its earlier quasi-impressionist self in the first movement and its barbarity in the second. Through means such as this, and the use of related rhythms and scales the work possesses a satisfying sense of unity. The first ever recording was given by The Bowling Green Philharmonia conducted by Emily Freeman Brown on TROY321.
The final work is Three Frescoes, written when Husa was in his mid-20s and studying with Honegger and Nadia Boulanger. Only the first Fresco has been recorded before, by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra under Barry Kolman on Marco Polo 8.223640 which, other than not including the last two Frescoes, shares an identical programme to this Supraphon release. At this early stage in his musical development the pungency of his writing was already established but there is an insinuating Francophile use of winds and some surly polyphony that sets up terse and tense drama, another consistent element of his orchestral music. The aria-like second Fresco brings clarity of texture but even in its tranquil moments, wisps of unease and watchful nervous energy shadow the music. The fugal finale brings the music to a vivid and satisfying conclusion and points as ever to Husa’s cohesive use of material. His modernist credentials were established early. In fact, what this disc triumphantly establishes is the logical development of his aesthetic; an abrasive but not unapproachable modernism.
I mentioned some competitor versions earlier. Esa-Pekka Salonen recorded Music for Prague 1968 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra DG 4778529 back in 2007 on a mixed composer programme. His finale is even slower than Brauner’s. Barry Kolman and his Slovak forces are much more incisive in this movement though they are much slower than Husa in the first Fresco. I strongly prefer Brauner here.
This is a first-class, extremely well recorded and annotated celebration of Husa’s music. It charts his various staging posts from his student immersion in Parisian culture, Boulanger’s rigour, and the precedent of Honegger’s symphonic mastery, via the expressive stridency of Music for Prague 1968 through to Reflections, the symphonic wholeness of which reaffirmed Husa’s belief in traditional forms but also novel sound conjunctions and orchestral colours.
Jonathan Woolf
