FIBICH: Symphonies nos. 1 & 2

Mogrelia, Andrew;
Razumovsky Symphony Orchestra

8.553699

As a composer, as in speech and background, Fibich was very much more part of German cultural tradition than of Czech, although he came to occupy a position between the two. His first operas were to German libretti and the eight surviving operas include in their dramatic sources the work of Schiller, Byron and Shakespeare, with the stage melodrama trilogy Hippodamia drawing on Sophocles and Euripides, using Czech libretti. He contributed to the repertoire of concert melodrama, to that of German and Czech song and to the list of tone-poems, in this last anticipating Smetana in his patriotic Zaboj, Slavoj a Ludek, as he anticipated the symphonic poems of Dvorak. Fibich was prolific as a composer and contributed to all major forms of music. His position in Czech music, however, has had a certain ambiguity. His German training, which guaranteed a sound technique, and, perhaps, his parentage, language and background, makes him very much less identifiably Bohemian than either Smetana or Dvorak. He remains, nevertheless, one of the most important Czech romantic composers of the later nineteenth century.

CD

Muzyka klasyczna

Naxos

02-03-1999

730099469920