A woman in the right place at the wrong time
mainThe Lebrecht Album of the Week features music by Geraldine Mucha:
Late in the Second World War, a Scottish composer in London fell in love with a Czech journalist. Geraldine Thomson was a rising talent at the Royal Academy of Music. Jiri Mucha was the son of a world-renowned artist, the man who had remade the fin-de-siecle image of Sarah Bernhardt in a style as unmistakable and widely imitated as Gustav Klimt’s.
Newly married, the Muchas returned in autumn 1945 to Prague…. When the Communists seized power, Jiri was arrested as an enemy of the people and Geraldine’s music was banned…
Read on here.
And here.
“A 1961 piano concerto reveals a considerable lyrical gift, albeit one that belongs to a much earlier era.”
So what? It sounds a bit as a critique. But in a time of cultural erosion harking back to an earlier era is an advantage. That concerto is excellent, a bit Bartokkish. There are worse models.
What if we were permitted to listen only to the music of our contemporaries, especially the ones officially certified as authentic contemporary even if these were in fact long dead…
BTW husband Mucha’s first wife was Vítězslava Kaprálová, Martinu’s muse dead in 1940 age 25 and mourned in Cz today as as the lost last link in the line stretching from Smetana to Martinu.
“If you can’t be one, marry one” — may have been his motto. And Geraldine’s concerto here has more than a trace of Martinu.
Norman thanks for posting.
Czechoslovakia was a very small country.