Chamber Orchestra Music.(Book review)

Karel Husa. Sinfonietta pro maly orchestr = for chamber orchestra. Praha: Cesky Rozhlas, c2007. [Pref. in Czech, Eng., by Radim Kolek on front-cover verso and title-page verso; composer's notes in Czech, Eng., p. [3]; score, p. 5-128; corrections, p. [129]. ISMN M-66061-076-3; pub. no. R 112.[euro]34.50]

The distinguished Czech-American composer Karel Husa might not have been a professional musician at all had politics not intervened. Husa's father, who owned one of the fashionable shoe stores in Prague, was determined to steer his son toward a career as a civil engineer. Despite this determination to guide his son toward the safe harbor of a practical profession, Husa pere was highly receptive to both music and the visual arts. Husa's mother further encouraged her son in music, buying him a violin when he was eight years old; this sensitive woman thought that it would be good for her future engineer to cultivate his inner life through a musical avocation. In addition to his eight years of study on the violin with Josef Svejnoha, Husa also studied the piano from the ages of twelve to fifteen with Marie Holubova-Bila, who introduced him to piano pieces by Haydn, Scarlatti, Mozart, and J. S. Bach.

In addition to these musical activities, Husa attended a technical high school, where he studied mathematics, drawing, painting, and modern languages, as well as played hockey and soccer. He evinced a keen interest in painting and for a time vacillated between music and art. When Husa was sixteen, his art teacher allowed him to progress to working with oils; indeed, his father proudly displayed some of his son's paintings in his shop window. Upon graduation from high school, Husa enrolled in the Technical University in Prague, seemingly destined for a vocation as an engineer. The year was 1939.

Neville Chamberlain's betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938--"a far away country ... of whom we know nothing"--led inexorably to the Nazi invasion of this hapless nation the following year. Responding to courageous student demonstrations, the Nazis closed virtually all the Czech universities; one of the few exceptions to this ban was the Prague Conservatory. After a period of preparation, Husa entered the Conservatory in 1941, joining the composition class of the distinguished composer, harpist, and pedagogue Jaroslav Ridky, Ridky, who idolized Mahler, introduced his students to the works of twentieth-century Czech composers such as Vitezslav Novak, Josef Suk, and, above all, Leos Janacek. (Ridky conducted the premiere of Janacek's Capriccio for left-hand piano and wind ensemble in 1926.) Discussion of contemporary music had to be done with discretion during this period, for the Nazis had branded all modernist music as "degenerate," and banned it.

During his studies with Ridky, Husa composed the charming Sonatina for piano, initially published by the firm of Fr. A. Urbanek in 1943, and the ebullient Overture for orchestra (1944-45). These two scores constituted his "graduation pieces" from the conservatory. Husa's next work to be acclaimed publicly was the Sinfonietta for chamber orchestra under review here, completed in 1946 and belatedly published in 2007 by Cesky Rozhlas. As noted by Radim Kolek in an introductory paragraph to the published ...