The woodwind trio is an orphan genre. No concert hall impresario builds a season around it, no recording label rushes to corner the market, and even the most devoted chamber music listener could probably name the Poulenc trio and then trail off into silence. Which makes this ArcoDiva disc — four Czech composers, one ensemble, music that spans nearly twenty years of separate recording sessions seamlessly stitched together — both a modest surprise and a genuine pleasure.
Start with the ensemble itself. The Novák Trio — oboist Gabriela Krcková, clarinetist Štěpán Koutník, bassoonist Vladimír Lejčko — celebrated thirty years together in 2014, and that kind of longevity doesn’t just produce technical security; it produces something harder to quantify, a shared sense of where a phrase is going before it gets there. You hear it in the way the three instruments breathe together, the oboe’s penetrating edge softened just slightly by long familiarity with its neighbors, the bassoon grounding the texture without ever turning ponderous. These are players who have stopped showing off for each other.
The largest share of the program belongs to Jaroslav Krcek (born 1939), a composer whose name won’t mean much to listeners outside Prague but whose musical instincts are consistently appealing. His Music for Trio and Renaissance Trio are accomplished, unpretentious works — the latter drawing on modal harmonies with the easy confidence of someone who’s absorbed Janáček and Martinů without being enslaved by either. But the piece that lingers is “Hail, Thou Graceful Music” — Zdráva Buď, Muziko Spanilá in Czech — a klezmer-inflected romp that catches you off guard. Krcek finds the sweet spot between folk energy and concert-hall refinement, and the Novák players ride that edge with evident delight. The clarinet especially — Koutník has the kind of warm, slightly reedy middle register that klezmer idiom demands — snaps through the ornamentation without tipping into caricature.
Jiří Gemrot (born 1957) contributes the longest single work, and his Moments for Oboe, Clarinet and Bassoon earns every one of its nearly thirteen minutes. Gemrot studied with Luboš Fišer and has developed a language that acknowledges modernism — there are chromatic passages here that would have been unthinkable in Dvořák’s Prague — without surrendering the melodic generosity that seems to be something of a Czech birthright. The piece unfolds in a series of character pieces, each distinct in tempo and color, and the Novák Trio navigates the shifts with intelligence, never letting the episodic structure feel fragmentary.
Ilja Hurník (born 1922) is the elder statesman here, and his Trio for Oboe, Clarinet and Bassoon is the disc’s most polished score — witty, elegant, and wearing its considerable craft lightly. Hurník has always had a gift for irony that stops well short of cynicism, and in this trio you can hear him playing with neo-classical conventions the way a cat plays with something it has no intention of actually eating. The slow movement has a singing quality that the Novák players honor with exquisite intonation.
Then there is Tomáš Svoboda’s Toccata — all ninety-five seconds of it — which is marked prestissimo possibile and which the Novák Trio decline to play at anything approaching that tempo. It’s a curious choice. The piece is a fleeting thing by design, a dash of pepper at the end of a meal, and playing it at a more leisurely pace doesn’t so much expand it as expose the thinness beneath the velocity. Whether the tempos reflect the ensemble’s interpretation or the disc’s circumstances — those two sessions nearly twenty years apart may have involved different priorities — the result is the one moment on the disc where you find yourself wanting to argue.
The recorded sound is clear and well-balanced, which matters enormously in woodwind chamber music, where intonation between instruments with fundamentally different acoustical natures can quickly turn problematic. The booklet notes, written by Krcková herself, are models of their kind: informative, personal without being precious, and translated into English with real fluency.
Does the program run short? Yes. Does the album title — Czech Contemporary Music — do the disc no favors in the marketplace? Also yes. These are real limitations. But the playing is consistently fine, the music is better than its obscurity suggests, and any listener willing to follow the Novák Trio into this particular corner of the repertoire will come out richer for the detour.
