How I Discovered...JANÁČEK
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 มี.ค. 2023
- One of the great discoveries of my college years was the music of Janáček. Here's how it happened, and how it felt. Feel free to share your own stories of your first encounters with this quirky, original, and passionate musical genius.
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One thing that got me deeper into Janacek was the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I saw in 1988 right when it came out. Janacek's string quartets and piano music are used throughout. The film also got me interested in Milan Kundera's books. For the sake of Janacek's operas and Kundera's novels, I decided to learn the Czech language and ended up moving to Olomouc and later Prague.
Shortly after buying the LP "Emerson, Lake and Palmer," in 1970, a friend told me that the first segment of the song "Knife Edge" was based on the Janacek Sinfonietta, which kindled my interest in the composer. I scoured my local local record store and found the 1963 Ančerl - Czech PO recording, which they put on their turntable (remember those days?) and cranked it up on the store sound system, which had plenty of power. It was mind blowing. The Sinfonietta remains my favorite by Janacek.
I first heard Janacek’s music as a theme of a TV show called Crown Court as as a then Brass Player we also played an arrangement of it in Brass Band and it just stuck. His melodic and rhythmic sensibility just appealed to me - just like Haydn, Hindemith and Wayne Shorter…if you know what I mean!
Ah, classical 'wings'!!! I would jog my hour in San Francisco, NYC, Chicago, etc., then walk back to my hotel by stopping at Tower and perusing their classical stuff and chatting with the knowledgeable clerks. Let alone hanging out in the late and much lamented Harmony House in the Detroit area, learning, and spending, with pleasure. What will todays young people do; hard to peruse digital stores in quite the same way. Why your channel is great to have-and your memories of those lovely, less streaming days! Thanks for this new series; will look forward to it!
Hi Dave….lovely idea for a discussion. At my secondary school in the 60s, we had a genius music teacher. Every morning the whole school (600) of us marched into the hall for Assembly. This entry was accompanied by Miss James playing Schubert impromptus, the easier bits of Beethoven sonatas etc. A few notices, then on scratchy LPs we had to listen to a piece of classical music. It ranged from Dowland, through the great symphonists (just a movement), to one of Holst’s Planets, one of the Four Sea interludes from Peter Grimes…and Janacek’s Sinfonietta. I loved all of it, though so many of my friends shifted and fidgeted. I feel so lucky. After a hymn and a prayer, we all filed out again to more excellent piano music. My father was an excellent jazz pianist, but also liked playing Rachmaninov and Bach. My mother sang and accompanied herself in Italian opera and Dvorak. She was an excellent pianist too. I was drenched in wonderful music from dawn to dusk. Now 70, I can look back on a life enchanted, enlivened, delighted, amazed by music. Thank you, Miss James. And thank you Dave for your beautiful enthusiasm for music, opening me up to even more wonders.
I discovered Janáček as a high school. Our little town high school did not have an orchestra, just a band and I was a pretty serious percussionist at the time. One day I heard that the university in the next town over was having auditions for their orchestra; they welcomed community members to audition. So I auditioned and made it in. The conductor was this outrageously and wonderfully eccentric woman from London and she decided to program the Janáček “Sinfonietta” for one of our concerts. I had never heard of him, but I was hooked from that first rehearsal of the Sinfonietta.
Since two years ago, the answer to how I discovered many composers is "thanks to David Hurwitz." (Not Janacek though, whom I discovered through Firkusny's recording of his piano music, which I found in the sales bin and bought on a whim.)
I came to know him through a video suggestion with a beautiful woman's portrait in the thumbnail... it was his daughter, for whom he composed a elegy for piano tenor and chorus - "Elegie na smrt dcery Olgy"... extremely beautiful and touching, performed by "Pěvecký sbor Čs. rozhlasu/Jan Kasal · Ivo Žídek · Jan Panenka"
One of my friends was fascinated by Janacek's music and he played for me the Glagolitic Mass. I disliked it very much at the time, it appeared chaotic and just to strange to digest. But some years later I listened live to the last movement of the first series of On an overgrown path. I was startled by this music and returned to Mass, Sinfonietta, quartets and chamber works. And it was IT.
In case anyone is interested, YUL BRYNNER had the leading role in the 1962 movie Taras Bulba. Tony Curtis had the part of Bulba's son, but Tony got top billing. There's an obscure movie about Thomas Edison. It's called "LIGHT"AS "BULB"A. Sorry folks.
First heard Sinfonietta on WQXR while I was visiting New York in my college days (1960?)
I'll struggle in this series to differentiate between when I first heard Janacek (not sure, certainly on the radio) and when I first knew I was hearing Janacek. It was a live performance of the Sinfonietta by the Pittsburgh Symphony. It was amazing to see all the brass lined up, the entire breadth of the orchestra. The volume pressed me into my seat. The next day, I ordered the Ancrel recording.
I know almost nothing about classical music but do pick up certain composers whenever they appear in Murakami novels and listening to Janacek has been so rewarding.
My first encounter with Janacek was in the fall of 1986. I was studying in Frankfurt, Germany, at the time, and heard Kat'a Kabanova with the Vienna Phil under Mackerras. The rest is, as the saying goes, listening history...
My own Janacek story is quite similar to yours. I began trying a Kubelik DG disc, in the Galleria series, with contained Taras and the Glagolitic Mass. And it was the Mass that blew my mind. When the last two timpani strokes fade away, I didn't believe those orchestral, organ and vocal sounds were possible. And I also thought "is THAT religious music?". I felt in love inmediately.
I absolutely love your channel and website Dave! So happy to find a kindred spirit who shares my love of music, especially the Czechs. I first heard Janacek as a 20 year old in the early 90s when I was living in Czechoslovakia. I visited Hukvaldy, Janacek's birth place, and the home he bought later in life that has been converted into a museum. Upstairs was a listening room, and our older Moravian hostess selected the second string quartet. The music was harsh and violent to my young years, disturbing even, but she knew the piece well and was deeply moved to tears. I was fascinated by her intense reaction and desperately wanted to understand what she felt in that music. I spent the next 30 years listening to every Janacek recording I could get my hands on and performance I could attend, and I think I'm starting to understand what she felt. I also got to see Vixen in Brno, Jenufa in Prague, and especially loved a concert of the Moravian Teachers Choir singing his works for male chorus. Thanks again for my favorite channel on TH-cam!
i first encountered the music of janacek in the second half of the 90s when i moved to east berlin.....back then a lot of smaller local public libraries where discontinued...so they gave there stuff away for free....the bigger public libraries also got rid of their eastern block and russian vinyl records.... so in the course of 2-3 years i got hundreds and hundreds of classical vinyl lps for free...... a lot of the stuff i didn't find that interesting ( some of the records i still haven t thorughly listened to yet) but when i listened to the supraphon janacek lps i was immediately hooked.... so i started collecting janacek records......i have a pop music listeners approach to music ...i only continue listening to recordings if i immediately like it...all the other stuff i through out....janacek reminds me of composers like thelonious monk...his style is very ideosyncratic...very different from all the other 20th century composers i 've listened too so far. the suprphon recordings ( ancerl, jilek, mackerras, jancek quartet, etc...)are still my favorites.
My high school German teacher was a polymath and was a proponent of classical music, including in the classroom. Among other things, he played the complete Gurrelieder for German class. He knew I was into classical, so would occasionally share other things with me. One day he gave me a cassette that he'd recorded a few things on. The first item was Sinfonietta. I had no idea what to make of it. It was so weird! But I kept playing it. Again, and again, and again. Didn't take long to hook me!
My first encounter with Janacek was through the film 'The unbearable lightness of being'. I was hooked right from the beginning. Starting with his quartets...there are worse things in life.
I was lucky enought to get to play the first and fifth movments of the Janacek sinfonietta with the Trondheim Symphony. At first the sound of the music was realy strange and seemed a bit to psychedelic for my liking, but now two years later his style realy has grown on me!