Terry Williams enjoys a musical tour of the Czech city of Brno, as he explores the nooks and crannies (and best recordings) of Jan\u00e1\u010dek’s Sinfonietta <\/p>
Leo\u0161 Jan\u00e1\u010dek was a Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist and teacher, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Composing across various musical forms including the string quartet, orchestral music, sacred music and, perhaps most famously, opera. We named Jan\u00e1\u010dek as one of the ten best Czech composers of all time<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Born in 1854 in Hukvaldy (near Ostrava in the modern-day Czech Republic) Jan\u00e1\u010dek was a late developer as a composer. His earlier adult years were spent as an organist and teacher, founding the Brno Organ School in 1881, and in devoting himself to the study of Moravian folk music.<\/p>\n Though as a young man he did travel to both Leipzig and Vienna to study, Jan\u00e1\u010dek returned home from both having achieved fairly little. It wasn\u2019t until the turn of the 20th century that, at last, he started to win acclaim as a composer, and even then his progress was hindered by a scathing review he had written back in 1887 about the opera The Bridegrooms<\/em> by Karel Kovarovic, who still held a grudge\u2026<\/p>\n In 1904, the 50-year-old Leo\u0161 Jan\u00e1\u010dek enjoyed his first triumph on home ground with Jenufa<\/em>, a tragic opera of rustic life, the music score of which closely followed the speech-rhythms of his native Moravia. (We named Jenufa one of the 20 greatest operas of all time<\/strong><\/a>). This set the pattern for almost everything that followed.<\/p>\n