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Five further works to enjoy after listening to Janácek’s Taras Bulba
Two years after Taras Bulba, Janácek embarked on another Slav folklore-inspired tone poem, this time based on the legend of a Czech mountain. With its fidgety staccato string motifs and brass calls to arms, The Ballad of Blaník is cut from very much the same orchestral cloth as Taras Bulba, but its message could not be more different – the knights we encounter here are not embarking on a trail of bloodshed but instead have exchanged their weapons for agricultural tools. (BBC SSO/ILAN Volkov Hyperion SACDA67517)
The spark for Taras Bulba itself may well have come from Liszt’s Hunnenschlacht, whose bellicose orchestral score is similarly interspersed with the sound of a solemn church organ. This 1857 symphonic poem, itself inspired by a Wilhelm von Kaulbach painting, tells of the battle of the Catalaunian Fields in 451, in which the Christians and the Huns massacred each other with such ferocity that, even after death, they were said to have continued fighting each other in Heaven. (BBC Philharmonic/noseda Chandos CHAN10490)
Not that Janácek was short of examples by his own countrymen,
as grisly tone poems are very much a Czech forte. In 1896 Dvoˇrák wrote four such works – The Golden Spinning Wheel, The Noon Witch, The Water Goblin and The Wild Dove – all of which see this master of musical story-tellers depict various gruesome goings-on in brilliantly vivid, and gloriously tuneful, detail. (Berlin Philharmonic/simon Rattle Warner Classics 558 0192)
Try also Toman and the Wood Nymph, a doom-laden symphonic poem by Víteˇzslav Novák from 1907, again based on Czech legend. Here, love provides the key to misery as, discovering that his girl has fallen for someone else, Toman heads into the forest to die in the arms of a woodland fairy. Novák wears his hero’s heart on his sleeve in a passionate, percussive score. (BBC Philharmonic/pe ek Chandos CHAN9821).
Finally, while the title character of Richard Strauss’s 1895 tone poem
Till Eulenspiegel’s lustige Streiche was an altogether jollier fellow than your average Czech folk hero, he still comes to a sticky end. His death is depicted in much the same manner as Ostap’s in Taras Bulba – by the high-pitched squealing of a clarinet. (Pittsburgh SO/ Honeck Reference Recordings FR707)
Dvorák depicts various gruesome goings-on in brilliantly vivid detail