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Czech music: a life-long love story.

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My relationship with Czech Music is a life long love story. It goes back to my childhood, many years before I first visited the country and the people from which it was born. The music had prepared me for that visit and for an understanding of the Czech soul and people, which in turn deepened my knowledge of the music.

As a child, I had of course become acquainted with the popular masterpieces of Smetana and Dvorak. Then came a big shock. As a 17-year-old high school student, back in 1948, I attend a concert at the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts, conducted by the freshly exiled Rafael Kubelik, which began with Bohuslav Martinues Double Concerto. That powerful masterpiece completely overwhelmed me. The concert, during which Rudolf Firkusny played Brahms's d-minor Concerto, most likely ended with Roussel's Third Symphony, was another discovery and another shock. I have retained a deep affinity for the music of Roussel, which is almost forgotten today in France and Belgium, and is actually more frequently performed in Prague than in Paris ... One year later, Kubelik was back in Brussel, this time with Martinu's Fourth Symphony, which to this day remains my favorite of the Six. In fact, I proudly own the original manuscript of the fourth symphony, given to me as a present from Charlotte Martinu to thank me for my work on her husband--but more about this later. At the time I was able to purchase the first 78 R. M. P. records (Ultraphon) of the Symphony, performed by Czech Philharmonic under Kubelik (a wonderful performance due for re-issue on CD in 2004), but my best friend, also a great admirer of Martinu, broke one of the brittle Shelloc disks accidentaly and I was unable to replace it. So the forth kept missing in my LP library until the wonderful performance under my friend Martin Turnovsky came out in the mid-sixties. Except for a few standard pieces, Czech music was rarely played in France or in Belgium at the time, so I mainly relied upon Supraphon LPs to increase my knowledge, which soon grew to include the old masters and the few contemporary composers that Communist censorship allowed. In 1958 I completed my studies at the Paris Conservatoire with Olivier Messiaen as my most important teacher there. I chose pre-classical Czech-Symphonies as a graduation in music history, a difficult piece of work for lack of material (I didn't, and to my shame I still don't know Czech), except some very biased writing in German about the Manheim school, whole Czech roots were totally underrated. In autumn of the same year, I finally laid the first visit of my (at present) twenty-five visits to Prague. Since I could not afford the expenses of a tourist visit, and since political circumstances made travelling difficult, I sought and found employment with the French agents for Supraphon and thus was able to visit Prague twice a year as a guest of Artia. Martinu, of course, was my primary concern. I owned the first book by Milos Safranek...

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