BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra & Ilan Volkov - Janáček: Mr Brouček Suite, The Eternal Gospel & Other Orchestral Music (2024) [Hi-Res]

The years either side of the First World War were a time of renaissance for the Czech nationand at the heart of this rebirth was the music of Leo Jancek. The Fiddlers Child, a ballad for solo violin (Elizabeth Layton in this exciting new recording) and orchestra, tells a harrowing tale of supernatural malfaisance as a parable for the struggles of a perennially oppressed nation. Such a tone of double meaning is also to be found in The Eternal Gospel: overt religiosity becomes, for Jancek, an expression of the contemporary worlds need for reconciliationthe work received its premiere late in 1917. Similarly The Ballad of Blank, dating from a couple of years later, adapts traditional folk material into an orchestral miniature epic depicting the transformation of swords into ploughshares amid a scene of unabashed pastoral tranquillity. Janceks two Excursion of Mr Broucek operasthe excursions in question being to the moon and to the fifteenth centuryconcern themselves with traditional tales of medievalist escapism. Dedicated to the liberator of the Czech nation (Tom Masaryk, the countrys president in the years following its separation from the Austro-Hungarian empire), this is music of an irrepressible vivacity and optimism; the suite recorded here (prepared after the composers death) draws together the considerable quantity of purely orchestral music from the operasincluding some of Janceks original drafts. The broad sweep of these orchestral works is given full flight in luxurious performances from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under its Chief Conductor Ilan Volkov. Czechoslovakias independence was to be short-lived, but Janceks aspirational music can stand today as a symbol of what might have been.