The
Martinu Quartet
has specialized in music from its native Czech lands but has also played a good deal of American music, championing, among others, the composer (and practicing psychologist)
David Post
. Those wishing to sample
Post
's music couldn't do better than start with this pair of chamber works. The performances are very strong; clarinetist
Ludmila Peterkova
, heard in the
Concertino a cinque
, boasts that she is "the Czech answer to Germany's
Sabine Meyer
" and has the talent to deliver in a fluent, elegant reading. The music seems to superficially fall into established neoclassical patterns, especially in the harmonic treatments, but those who listen more deeply will find entirely original conceptions. The
is just what the title promises, a chamber "concerto" for all five instruments, with the weaving of all the solo parts expertly handled.
's
Piano Quintet
is a tribute to some of the Czech composers who died at Nazi Germany's Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp and also, in
's words, an effort "to show how their powerful musical ideas contain living seeds that can grow in new, transforming directions." The first two movements are rooted in music by
Gideon Klein
and
Pavel Haas
, respectively, while the finale features an extended quotation from
Viktor Ullmann
's opera
Der Kaiser von Atlantis
. The effect is moving and quite different from that of the
Clarinet Quintet
, yet still recognizably the work of the same composer. A very fine outing from the durable
, whose projects are almost always well considered. ~ James Manheim