Starter Packs

Complete your collection with these curated titles, grouped at a special discount.

Shop Now
Geraldine Mucha: Chamber Music / Stamic Quartet, Prague Wind Quintet
Brilliant Classics

Geraldine Mucha: Chamber Music / Stamic Quartet, Prague Wind Quintet

$13.99

Details

Composer
MUCHA, GERALDINE
Artist
Goodson, Veverka, Machat
Format
CD
Label
Brilliant Classics
Released
Jan 22, 2021
Catalog #
BRI95463
UPC
5028421954639

About

Geraldine Mucha learned to read music before words; her Scottish father, Marcus Thomson, taught at the Royal Academy of Music. Having turned 18 she became a student there herself, and at a party in 1941 she met her future husband, Jan Mucha, an exiled Czech war correspondent and son of the artist Alphonse Mucha. They settled in his home city of Prague at the end of the war, but Geraldine fled the Communist regime for Scotland after the invasion of Prague in 1968, and returned only after the fall of Communism in 1989. Jirí died in 1991 but Geraldine lived on until 2012, leaving a fair-sized body of instrumental music which had been performed throughout her lifetime but is only now being rediscovered. Only one other album of Mucha’s work is available, dedicated to her orchestral music. This newly available album, made in Prague in 2015, begins with the First String Quartet which she wrote in 1944 as a recent RAM graduate: a tight, well-argued work, inflected by the fiercely rhythmic folk idiom of Janácek and Bartók. There follows a collection of seven piano works including her most extensive piece for the instrument, a set of variations on an ‘Old Scottish Song’ which also shows a thorough command of a central-European idiom. The single-movement Second String Quartet dates from 1970 opens with a keening, Scottish-accented lament: taut and concise, both concealing and saying much in a short span. The Wind Quintet is a late work, from 1998, still elegiac in mood but now balanced by the kind of dance-like flow and momentum placing it in the tradition of wind-ensemble works from Mozart to Poulenc. This carefully programmed album ends with the Epitaph for oboe and string quintet which she composed in 1991 in memory of her late husband.

Tracklist 14 tracks

  1. 1 I. Variations on a Hucul folk-song 06:09
    Track
    1
    Title
    I. Variations on a Hucul folk-song
    Duration
    06:09
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Ensemble
    Stamic Quartet
  2. 2 II. Dumka 06:46
    Track
    2
    Title
    II. Dumka
    Duration
    06:46
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Ensemble
    Stamic Quartet
  3. 3 III. Arkan 03:12
    Track
    3
    Title
    III. Arkan
    Duration
    03:12
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Ensemble
    Stamic Quartet
  4. 4 Variations on an Old Scottish Song 09:50
    Track
    4
    Title
    Variations on an Old Scottish Song
    Duration
    09:50
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Performer
    Patricia Goodson
  5. 5 Tempo di Mazurka 01:36
    Track
    5
    Title
    Tempo di Mazurka
    Duration
    01:36
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Performer
    Patricia Goodson
  6. 6 Karel František Josef 00:30
    Track
    6
    Title
    Karel František Josef
    Duration
    00:30
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Performer
    Patricia Goodson
  7. 7 Minna Loveday DeCandole 00:26
    Track
    7
    Title
    Minna Loveday DeCandole
    Duration
    00:26
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Performer
    Patricia Goodson
  8. 8 Freddie DeCandole 00:34
    Track
    8
    Title
    Freddie DeCandole
    Duration
    00:34
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Performer
    Patricia Goodson
  9. 9 Lullaby for Alisdair 01:04
    Track
    9
    Title
    Lullaby for Alisdair
    Duration
    01:04
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Performer
    Patricia Goodson
  10. 10 For Erika 01:47
    Track
    10
    Title
    For Erika
    Duration
    01:47
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Performer
    Patricia Goodson
  11. 11 Naše cesta (Our Journey) 10:40
    Track
    11
    Title
    Naše cesta (Our Journey)
    Duration
    10:40
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Performer
    Jan Machat, Alena Grillová
  12. 12 String Quartet No. 2 13:42
    Track
    12
    Title
    String Quartet No. 2
    Duration
    13:42
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Ensemble
    Stamic Quartet
  13. 13 Wind Quintet 13:45
    Track
    13
    Title
    Wind Quintet
    Duration
    13:45
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Ensemble
    Stamic Quartet
  14. 14 Epitaph (in Memory of Jiří Mucha) 08:13
    Track
    14
    Title
    Epitaph (in Memory of Jiří Mucha)
    Duration
    08:13
    Composer
    Geraldine Thomsen Mucha
    Performer
    Vilém Veverka, Jan Machat
    Ensemble
    Stamic Quartet