Novák – Schulhoff – Liatochynskyï

Description

(Re)discover three works by three composers and, above all, three ways of using music to
resist the upheavals of the 20th century. Two of the three pieces on this recording, in fact, received their Quebec premieres under the quartet’s bows as part of the regular seasons of the Voxpopuli Concerts.

A leading figure in the musical life of the young Czech Republic, Vítězslav Novák was a conservative composer who nevertheless steered clear of academicism and possessed a truly distinctive musical personality. Composed in 1905, his Second String Quartet opens with a majestic fugue and concludes with a rhythmic and contrasting fantasia.

Erwin Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet (1924) form a suite of dances shaped by a boundless imagination. Schulhoff, the enfant terrible of Czech music, blended Dada, Schoenberg, jazz, and Soviet realism within a single work. A Jew, a communist, and an artist labeled “degenerate,” he was arrested on the very first day of the Nazi occupation and died in a concentration camp. His music, however, has survived.

Borys Lyatochynsky’s String Quartet No. 4 (1943), written in the midst of the war, charts a path from tragedy to hope. A contemporary of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Lyatochynsky was erased from Soviet cultural history along with all Ukrainian artists an act of such brutality that resonates with particular poignancy today