Jindřich Feld, Josef Matěj

condition (record/cover): NM / VG (1" sticker removal damage on front and ring wear)

The string quartet has been the defining form of Czech chamber music since Smetana's autobiographical From My Life. The Smetana Quartet, founded in 1945, became the primary vehicle through which the postwar generation of Czech composers had their chamber music heard, not only at home but internationally - and their advocacy for living composers was central to the survival of a tradition that could easily have been strangled by socialist realism's demands for accessible, optimistic content.

Jindřich Feld (1925-2007) was described by later commentators as the spiritual heir to Martinů through his non-conformism and his francophilia - a composer who built what one critic called "a timeless language" out of Stravinsky, Bartók, and Berg, without erasing what is distinctly Slavonic in his expressive instinct. His Fourth String Quartet, presented here, won the State Prize in 1968 - the same year he was visiting professor at the University of Adelaide, where he composed his Dramatic Fantasy: The Days of August as a direct protest against the Soviet invasion of his homeland. The Fourth Quartet belongs to the most concentrated period of his development, the serial and aleatoric techniques of his middle period absorbed into a language of increasing formal compression.

Josef Matěj (1922-1992) worked in a more conservative post-Romantic language than Feld, but with no less formal command. His Second String Quartet, the work on this LP, is among his most structurally assured pieces. Performed by the Smetana Quartet. Original Supraphon pressing.