A Career Beyond Borders

Presented by the Bard Music Festival

The 2025 Bard Music Festival examines the life and times of Bohuslav Martinů, the 20th century’s foremost Czech composer, whose music is nonetheless largely unfamiliar to U.S. audiences today.

Harnessing Bard’s unusual ability to integrate orchestral, vocal, and chamber works within a single event, this Opening Night Celebration is the first of three programs devoted exclusively to Martinů’s own music.

Although none of the featured works were composed in his homeland, all testify to its profound spiritual importance to him. Set to Czech folk texts, the nostalgic song cycle Petrklíč / Primrose draws on the modes and rhythms of Moravian dance. Czech folk influences likewise color the Fantasia, in which oboe and theremin function as dueling soloists, illustrating Martinů’s creative approach to timbre. Commissioned for The Cleveland Orchestra to celebrate Czechoslovakia’s 25th anniversary, his Second Symphony uses Czech motifs to achieve its pastoral lyricism. By contrast, the contemporaneous First Piano Quartet evokes the drama and turbulence of its wartime creation, and the Double Concerto for string orchestras, piano, and timpani, completed on the day of the Munich Agreement, seems to capture the tension of impending war. A concerto grosso whose dark-hued final movement concludes with an unresolved dissonance, this powerful work is one of the composer’s crowning achievements.

Image: Bohuslav Martinů in Darien, CT, 1943. Courtesy of Bohuslav Martinů Center in Polička, Czechia.