Kalabis Symphonies and Concertos – Czech Philharmonic

Somewhere in the vast unfairness of musical reputation there is a special purgatory reserved for Czech composers who were neither Dvořák nor Janáček nor Martinů. It has held Viktor Kalabis captive for decades, and shows no immediate sign of releasing him. That his advocates included Karel Ančerl, Václav Neumann, and a young Jiří Bělohlávek tells you something. That most American concertgoers could not hum four bars of his music tells you something else, and it is the less flattering truth.

This three-disc Supraphon anniversary set is cause enough for celebration on its own, quite apart from the excellence of the remastering. It makes the strongest possible case that the neglect has been our loss, not his.

Start with the Symphony No. 2, subtitled Sinfonia Pacis, composed as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded. Never mind the booklet’s dating quibble; the Kalabis Foundation says 1961–62, and I’m inclined to trust them. Sergiu Celibidache is reported to have called it one of the great symphonies of the century. That is Celibidache being Celibidache, prone to pronouncements of oracular finality about works few of his listeners knew. And no, it isn’t that. But it is a genuinely gripping twenty-eight minutes, urgent without hectoring, its climaxes earned rather than manufactured. You hear a composer who absorbed Bartók’s night-music atmospherics and Shostakovich’s gift for the long unbroken line, and made something that is neither pastiche nor imitation but simply Czech, in that hard-to-define way that has nothing to do with folklore quotation and everything to do with a certain melancholic clarity of orchestral thought.

The Violin Concerto No. 1, op. 17, follows, Kalabis conducting his own score, with Petr Škvor the eloquent soloist. Here the surprise is how Szymanowski-adjacent it sounds, all sensuous arching lines wrapped around passages of twelve-tone writing so gently deployed you’d barely clock the craft if the notes didn’t tell you. That’s Kalabis’s method in miniature: modernist rigor smuggled in under lyrical cover. Nobody in the front row need feel assaulted.

The Symphonic Variations, op. 24, dedicated to Neumann and led by him here with the kind of idiomatic, unfussy authority that made his Czech Philharmonic tenure a golden one, even if history persists in undervaluing him next to Kubelík or Talich, are the most purely intellectual piece on the first disc, and also the most compact. Twelve minutes, no fat.

Disc two belongs to bigger game. The Concerto for large orchestra, op. 25, commissioned by Ančerl for the Czech Philharmonic he built into one of the wonders of the postwar musical world, gets a reading under Ladislav Slovák that has real bite: brass that snarls without coarsening, string tuttis of real weight. Structurally it owes an obvious debt to Bartók’s more famous orchestral concerto, but Kalabis’s four movements chart their own path, less folkloric, more austere, occasionally verging on the bleak.

Then the Symphony No. 3, op. 33, premiered by the twenty-something Bělohlávek, heard here near the very start of a career that would eventually take him to the BBC Symphony and back home again to the orchestra he loved best. The sound on this track is the thinnest of the set, admittedly. Strings turn a bit gray in fortissimo passages, the ambience noticeably boxier than its neighbors. But plenty of contemporary orchestral recordings from major labels, engineered with vastly larger budgets and newer technology, still don’t achieve this kind of front-to-back clarity. Supraphon’s house sound in this era, whatever its limitations, had a way of letting you hear inner voices that many an SACD today buries in reverb.

The trumpet concerto, Le Tambour de Villevieille, an unexpectedly Gallic title for a Czech score, brings Miroslav Kejmar’s burnished, unforced tone to bear on music that toggles between martial swagger and something more inward, almost valedictory. The two late soloist vehicles, the harpsichord concerto with Zuzana Růžičková, who did more than perhaps anyone alive to keep the instrument relevant in twentieth-century composition, and the concerto for piano and winds, close the set on a note of hard-won concentration rather than showy summation. Kalabis was never a composer interested in the grand exit.

Is there a modern integral release that supersedes this? Not really. Nobody else has attempted the whole span, and these performances, several dating to the composer’s own lifetime and made with his evident collaboration, carry an authority that a fresh traversal, however well-intentioned, would struggle to match. The engineering ranges from very good to merely good, never poor. For anyone still operating under the delusion that Czech music after Janáček dwindled into provincial also-rans, this box is a corrective, bluntly administered. Kalabis deserved better than history gave him. This is the next best thing to actual justice.