These CDs are the first two of an eventual eight CDs that will contain all of Zdeněk Fibich’s orchestral works in performances by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marek Štilec. (An additional two CDs of Fibich’s tone poems, overtures and ballet music have already appeared.) The recordings are being released by Naxos in collaboration with the Zdeněk Fibich Society. The website for the project contains extensive biographical information about the composer, as well as programme notes and analytical guides to the first and second symphonies, in both Czech and English (www.fibich.cz). In addition to including either previously unrecorded works or works for which recordings are currently unavailable, these performances incorporate new research by Štilec into manuscript sources and early performance materials. The manuscript of the first symphony, for instance, includes annotations by the composer that do not appear in the published scores, and Štilec has consulted the parts for the tone poem V podvečer (At Twilight) used by the orchestra of the Prague National Theatre for the work’s premiere, conducted by Adolf Čech.Footnote ¹

Music lovers of a certain age will recognize Zdeněk Fibich’s name from his lovely Reminiscence op. 41, no. 4, once well known in Jan Kubelík’s arrangement for violin and piano under the title Poème. Simplified arrangements of the Poème can still be found in venerable piano collections like Schirmer’s 59 Piano Solos You Like to Play, but even this piece has largely gone the way of all salon music. Fibich’s major works are in the genres of melodrama and opera, and these have not travelled well outside of the Czech lands. While a dedicated concertgoer could easily enjoy a lifetime of performances without hearing a note of Fibich’s music (at least outside the Czech lands) most of his output is easily accessible on recordings. The Symphony No. 1 in F major illustrates this split between the concert and recorded repertoires. Although rarely performed, it has been released on at least five CDs, ranging from a reissue of Karel Šejna’s 1950 recording with the Czech Philharmonic, to the present version from 2012. To the best of my knowledge, the other work on Štilec’s recording, Dojmy z venkova (Impressions from the Country) op. 54, has only appeared once previously (Douglas Bostock, Carlsbad Symphony Orchestra), and this recording is the only one currently available.

Fibich’s Symphony No. 1 audibly reflects its somewhat convoluted origins. The symphony was completed and premiered in 1883, but the first movement was composed in 1877, and the middle two movements appear to date from the same period. While the finale was the last movement to be added to the symphony, Czech scholars have long honoured Anežka Schulzová’s report that it was a revised version of a movement from an unpublished 1868 symphony composed during Fibich’s studies at the Leipzig Conservatory, which would spread the gestation of the symphony over 15 years (Vladimír Hudec, in his 2001 Bärenreiter thematic catalogue describes this as ‘highly improbable’).Footnote ²

Symphony No. 2 is a more mature and accomplished work, composed between April 1892 and March 1893, not long after the completion of the stage melodrama trilogy Hippodamie, which occupied Fibich from 1888 to 1891. Fibich conducted the premiere of the symphony in Prague in April 1893, and the journal Dalibor published a glowing review, declaring that

The second symphony was heard again in Vienna in December 1893, on a subscription concert of the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Hans Richter (to whom Fibich’s third symphony is dedicated).

The biographical sketch on the project’s website, following a long-standing practice in Czech Fibich reception, treats the works from 1892 primarily in the context of Fibich’s relationship to Anežka Schulzová, the former student who became Fibich’s lover and librettist. The second disc is almost entirely devoted to pieces associated closely with Schulzová. According to Schulzová’s brother Bohuslav, family tradition held that the initial motive of the second symphony represented the words ‘Anežko drahá’ (played by the horns), ‘ted’ jsi má!’ (violins) (‘Darling Anežka, now you’re mine!’). This motive appears in all four movements of the symphony, and is especially prominent in the coda of the finale. The tone poem V Podvečer (At Twilight) is the orchestral work most intimately tied to Schulzová and to her family. The piece is intended to evoke the evening walks that Fibich took with the Schulz family on Žofín Island. Again according to Bohuslav Schulz, not only did Fibich identify specific themes that represented Anežka’s parents and youngest sister, he even brought the manuscript score to the Schultz home and had the family fill in a few missing notes.Footnote ⁴ The ‘Darling Anežka’ motive from the second symphony appears softly in cello and bass pizzicati in the final bars. The centre of the tone poem is an orchestration of the Reminiscence for piano, where it is, in Gerald Abraham’s unflattering description, ‘lusciously scored, worked up to an overdone climax, surrounded by bird calls …’.Footnote ⁵

The performances are competitive with other recordings of this repertoire from the stereo era. The orchestral playing is not at the highest international level, and the ensemble and intonation in the strings is sometimes problematic. There is some fine individual playing, especially from the solo winds and the principal cello, and, to be fair, even more famous orchestras are frequently not heard to their best advantage in less familiar repertoire like this. Probably not coincidentally, the best-known piece, V podvečer, receives the most secure and convincing performance. Tempos in fast movements tend to be on the cautious side, and are both below the published metronome markings in the first symphony and slower than most other recordings of the second, especially in the Scherzo and in the Finale. Although is a slight and early work, the Idyll for Clarinet and Orchestra (Selanka op. 16) is exquisitely played by the excellent young Czech clarinettist Irvin Venyš. In purely musical terms, the 1950s recordings of the symphonies by Karel Sejna and the Czech Philharmonic for Supraphon are clearly preferable to more recent renditions, but the sound quality of those versions is far from ideal, even for the time.

These recordings are in some ways more interesting for what they say about musical life in the Czech Republic a quarter century after the Velvet Revolution than as sound documents. Between the World War Two and 1989, Fibich had been essentially a ward of the Czechoslovak state. The Zdeněk Fibich Society began a critical edition of his works in the mid-1950s, with the scores published by the State Publishers of Literature, Music and Art in Prague. For decades, the only recordings of Fibich’s symphonies featured either the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra or the Brno State Philharmonic Orchestra, and were released by Supraphon, the state recording company. The present recordings, however, are the product of a very different Czech society. Although issued and distributed by Naxos, the CD boxes are festooned with logos for Czech oil distribution, billboard and document delivery firms. The Czech National Symphony Orchestra, despite the name, is a hard-working independent orchestra that supports itself with a variety of activities, including collaborating with artists running the gamut from George Michael to Andrea Bocelli and recording film scores. The recordings were made in the orchestra’s own studios, and engineered by Jiří Štilec, a major figure in the Czech classical music business (and the father of the conductor, Marek Štilec). Formerly the head of Supraphon Recordings, the elder Štilec was forced out when Supraphon was absorbed by the Bonton media group and went on to resuscitate the Ultraphon label and found the ArcoDiva management and production company. These recordings preserve a network of financial, social and institutional relationships peculiar to the present-day Czech Republic as tellingly as they do a set of orchestral works.