Suk, Martinu, Fiser - Works for Violin and Piano
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Label: Supraphon
Cat No: SU43612
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Chamber
Release Date: 27th June 2025
Contents
Works
Violin Sonata 'The Hands'Czech Rhapsody for violin and piano, H307
Violin Sonata no.1, H182 (1929)
Pieces (4) for violin and piano, op.17
Artists
Daniel Matejca (violin)Jan Schulmeister (piano)
Works
Violin Sonata 'The Hands'Czech Rhapsody for violin and piano, H307
Violin Sonata no.1, H182 (1929)
Pieces (4) for violin and piano, op.17
Artists
Daniel Matejca (violin)Jan Schulmeister (piano)
About
The Supraphon debut of 18-year-old Daniel Matejča (Ysa˙e - Violin Sonatas, 2023) has attracted great attention with critics around the world writing about his remarkable talent, comparing his recording with the very best. That same year, the 17-year-old pianist Jan Schulmeister came away from Texas with third prize at the prestigious Cliburn Junior Competition. And also that year, the Matejča–Schulmeister duo celebrated victory in the chamber music category at the competition Concertino Praga; that opened them the door to the studio for the making of this recording.
Instead of brilliant, virtuosic show pieces, the young artists chose challenging Czech repertoire of the 20th century with pivotal works by Suk, Martinů, and Luboš Fišer. Martinů composed his Czech Rhapsody in the USA just after the end of the Second World War for Fritz Kreisler, who was 70 years old by then. Even today, this beautiful composition is a great technical challenge for the soloist. Martinů’s First Violin Sonata (1929) still belongs to the composer’s Paris period, as can be seen from jazz elements and the sometimes impressionistic mood of the piano part. The third composer, Luboš Fišer, is known mainly in his homeland, but his music also earned international awards (UNESCO prize, Prix d’Italia). His violin sonata The Hands was originally supposed to have been titled Crux, but that was completely unacceptable during the period of harsh communist rule. In the words of Ivan Štraus, who premiered the sonata, “...the composition could be interpreted as a loose depiction of the Stations of the Cross at Easter with dramatic moments of whipping, hatred, and anxiety followed by a funeral procession (pizzicato) and then the glorious Resurrection in the concluding apotheosis to the sound of bells.”
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Suk: 4 Pieces, op.17 (1900): I. Quasi balatta. Andante sostenuto
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2Suk: 4 Pieces, op.17 (1900): II. Appassionato. Vivace
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3Suk: 4 Pieces, op.17 (1900): III. Un poco triste. Andante espressivo
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4Suk: 4 Pieces, op.17 (1900): IV. Burleska. Allegro vivace
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5Martinu: Czech Rhapsody, H307 (1945)
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6Fišer: The Hands, Sonata for Violin and Piano (1961)
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7Martinu: Violin Sonata No.1, H182 (1929): I. Introduction et Allegro
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8Martinu: Violin Sonata No.1, H182 (1929): II. Andante
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9Martinu: Violin Sonata No.1, H182 (1929): III. Allegretto
Europadisc Review
Czech violinist Daniel Matejča was just shy of his 18th birthday when his Supraphon album of Eugčne Ysa˙e’s Sonatas for solo violin was released in 2023. That disc earned wide praise, even when compared with the likes of Hilary Hahn, with Gramophone’s Rob Cowan describing it as ‘very clearly focused, brilliant yet never flashy’. That same unflashy brilliance is on display in his latest Supraphon release of Czech works for violin and piano, where he is partnered by the still younger Jan Schulmeister. Together, they won the chamber music category in the 2023 Dvořák International Radio Competition, and on this new disc you can hear their preternaturally intelligent musicality deployed in repertoire that is, for the most part, relatively little represented on record.
They open with Josef Suk’s Four Pieces for Violin and Piano, op.17 (1900), of which the concluding Burleska has taken on a life of its own as a virtuoso showpiece, but complete recordings are much rarer. That’s a shame, as the other three movements are just as characterful, even though composed some years before the various blows of fate that changed the expressive intensity of Suk’s musical language. The opening movement, titled Quasi balata, has a melancholy mood which is accentuated by expressionistic chromaticism. The Appassionato second movement begins with the spiky brilliance that characterises Suk’s scherzos, before giving way to an impassioned central section. Matejča’s intense vibrato and Schulmeister’s sparklingly incisive pianism brilliantly point up these contrasts. The third movement is marked Un poco triste, and is a late-Romantic take on the dumkas of Suk’s father-in-law, Dvořák, full of rhythmic poise and soulfulness. In the famous Burleska, by taking the music marginally slower than the usual breakneck speed, Matejča and Schulmeister bring an added musicality and, in the middle section, really dig in with some finely-judged rubato, while the outer sections gleam magically. They give the Four Pieces as a whole an increased cogency which is very refreshing.
After this fabulous opening, the album presents two far less familiar single-movement works. Bohuslav Martinů’s Czech Rhapsody (1945) shares its title with one of his youthful compositions for baritone, chorus and orchestra, which celebrated Czechoslovak independence in 1918. The Czechness of the violin-and-piano piece, however, is rather more generalised. It was composed in just two weeks for a fellow emigré from the old Austro-Hungarian lands, the great Fritz Kreisler, and has a mood of heartfelt nostalgia which gives way to lively virtuosity in the central sections. Matejča rises splendidly to the music’s many dazzling technical challenges, but also imbues the more reflective passages with a depth and richness of tone that never tips over into the cloying.
Born in the year of Suk’s death, Luboš Fišer (pronounced ‘Loo-bosh Fisher’, 1935–1999) was one of Czechoslovakia’s most prolific composers of cinema and television soundtracks in the 1960s and 70s. His compositions in more traditional classical genres, while less numerous, are no less accomplished. The Violin Sonata ‘Ruce’ (‘The Hands’) was composed for an interdisciplinary project in 1961, and focuses on hands as symbols of human activity and communication, as well as their physical movement during performance. If that sounds distinctly postmodern, the music itself – with frequent changes of tempo, contrasts between intense activity and near-static passages, and a modernist edginess – is absorbing for the listener but challenging for the performers, with the piano part requiring just as much skill and dynamic care as the violin. A sequence of chant-like piano octaves hints at the original title, Crux, whose religious overtones led to its suppression. Here this 11-minute work receives a performance of fabulous intensity and deep commitment which is hard to imagine being bettered, and which should earn Fišer many new admirers.
Martinů’s violin sonatas are less widely performed than his cello sonatas, but on the evidence of the three-movement Violin Sonata no.1 (1929), composed toward the end of his stay in Paris, they deserve greater exposure. It combines the influence of Impressionism (particularly in the piano writing) with abundant jazz inflections as well as spiky rhythms and tonal ambiguity. The huge array of colours is superbly caught in this performance, where even the pizzicato passages of the bluesy central movement have plenty of body to them, while the sweeping melody and the richness of the piano writing leap out of the speakers. The cadenza passages in the outer movements clearly hold no fears for Matejča, who endows them with a jazz-like freedom, and it is to be hoped that he and Schulmeister will return with more 20th-century Czech treasures soon, for this is one of the most satisfying, thoughtful and imaginatively realised recital discs we have heard this year. Nicely focused and well-balanced sound, and informative booklet notes by Jana Honzíková, complete this hugely attractive package.
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