Review by JJ February 7, 2008 (2 of 3 found this review helpful)
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Ladislav Kubik was born in Prague in 1946. He studied composition with Emil Hlobil and Jiri Pauer, and musical theory mainly with Karel Janecek and Karel Risinger. Today professor of composition at Florida State University in the United States, Kubik, after his musical studies he also pursued his composing career in Europe. The program heard in this recording reveals the talent of a musician who is both sensitive and serious. With “Songs of Zhivago” for tenor and orchestra, written between 2002 and 2005, based on Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece, Kubik delights us in a neo-classicism rooted in a language of clarity. As Jahn Dehner points out, “In this cycle Kubik’s purpose is to give a portrait of the writer; the way in which he organizes Pasternak’s poems aims at giving meaning to the whole cycle. It thus begins with the poem “My Sister Life”, which is taken from a collection of poems published thirty years before the novel “Doctor Zhivago”.” The “Brief Concerto” for piano and orchestra, dating from 1998, is classically crafted wherein the solo instrument seems freed of all language constraints. The “Sinfonietta No. 2” is inspired by a biblical text. The score was written in 1999 for a large orchestra with a particularly imposing percussion section. Here then is music that is brilliant, delicate and powerful all at once, and that is urgent to discover in order to hear what contemporary music still has to say.
Jean-Jacques Millo Translation Lawrence Schulman
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