David Post: Concertino á cinque & Piano Quintet

Album review

The Martinů Quartet has specialized in music from its native Czech lands but has also played a good deal of American music, championing, among others, the composer (and practicing psychologist) David Post. Those wishing to sample Post's music couldn't do better than start with this pair of chamber works. The performances are very strong; clarinetist Ludmila Peterková, heard in the Concertino a cinque, boasts that she is "the Czech answer to Germany's Sabine Meyer" and has the talent to deliver in a fluent, elegant reading. The music seems to superficially fall into established neoclassical patterns, especially in the harmonic treatments, but those who listen more deeply will find entirely original conceptions. The Concertino a cinque is just what the title promises, a chamber "concerto" for all five instruments, with the weaving of all the solo parts expertly handled. Post's Piano Quintet is a tribute to some of the Czech composers who died at Nazi Germany's Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp and also, in Post's words, an effort "to show how their powerful musical ideas contain living seeds that can grow in new, transforming directions." The first two movements are rooted in music by Gideon Klein and Pavel Haas, respectively, while the finale features an extended quotation from Viktor Ullmann's opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis. The effect is moving and quite different from that of the Clarinet Quintet, yet still recognizably the work of the same composer. A very fine outing from the durable Martinů Quartet, whose projects are almost always well considered.
© James Manheim /TiVo