Mucha: Chamber Music

Chronique

Composer Geraldine Mucha has a life story with many interesting features, not the least of which is that she continued composing into great old age. While studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London, she met war correspondent Jiří Mucha, and the two fell in love and married. Even in the String Quartet No. 1 of 1944, before the pair moved to Prague, her music shows a concise Bartókian grasp of Eastern European folk idioms. The couple continued to live in Czechoslovakia, working to protect the artworks of Jiří's father Alphonse Mucha against the increasing depredations of the Communist regime. Scriptwriters, sharpen your pencils! Perhaps as a coping mechanism, Mucha retained features of the music of her native Scotland in works such as the Variations on an Old Scottish Song for piano; in these works, she cultivated not a pastoral style but a delightful kind of Scottish Impressionism. As repression deepened after the Soviet invasion of Czechslovakia in 1968, Mucha returned to Scotland, but after the fall of Communism (and her husband's death), she returned to Prague and lived there for the rest of her life, writing music almost until her death at age 95. Among her pieces of the period are the small piano works dedicated to Czech friends included on this release; these are distinctive miniatures. Mucha's music is not easy to categorize: it is certainly not avant-garde, but it combines styles of the past in unusual configurations. She is a superb melodist at times; sample the second movement, "Dumka," of the String Quartet No. 1 for evidence. The Brilliant label here assembles a competent group of mostly Czech musicians. Hear the virtuoso work of flutist Jan Machat, the work's dedicatee, in the flute-and-piano piece Naše cest (Our Journey). The label has done a service by broadening knowledge of Mucha, who has not been heard much in the West despite her origins, and any lover of contemporary chamber music will enjoy this release.

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