condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Two Czech composers of the same generation - Oldřich František Korte (1926-2014) and Ilja Hurník (1922-2013) - who arrived at different solutions to the problem of writing contemporary music within a political system that alternated between tolerating and suppressing modernist language, and who share this LP in Supraphon's Musica Nova Bohemica series.

Korte's biography carries some of the extreme weight of twentieth-century Czech history. He was imprisoned by the Nazis during the war, and twice imprisoned by the communists afterward - the first time for attempting to leave Czechoslovakia to study composition with Bohuslav Martinů. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he never grew bitter; the love of Martinů's music that motivated that first arrest remained absolute throughout his life. His analytical writings on Martinů's works are considered among the most penetrating in the literature. His own compositions - the Piano Sonata was taken up by Garrick Ohlsson and performed internationally - occupy a position that is formally rigorous and emotionally direct, the craft hard-won and the feeling unguarded.

Hurník studied at the Prague Conservatory and with Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová at the Academy, and built a diverse career as composer, essayist, and humorist. His brother-in-law was Petr Eben; his son Lukáš Hurník is also a composer. The works on this LP - chamber and orchestral pieces from the 1950s and 1960s - sit within a neo-classical and lightly modernist language, the structural elegance of his writing balanced by an evident delight in color and contrast. His ballet music and chamber suites reached the Czech Philharmonic under Karel Ančerl. Original Supraphon pressing.