Prague

Vítezslava Kaprálová, moves to Prague, a vibrant city buzzing with ideas, where the twenty-year-old brilliant young composition student expands her musical horizons with some astonishing results.

Born in 1915 into a musical family, Vítezslava Kaprálová was one of the brightest young composers to emerge in Czech music inbetween the two world wars. A link with her mentor, the composer Bohuslav Martinu, with whom she later became romantically involved, arguably has unfairly impinged on her posthumous reputation; Kaprálová achieved considerable success under her own steam, notching up a series of professional achievements that set her apart from her contemporaries. She was the first woman to graduate as a composer from the Brno Conservatory, the first woman to be given the prestigious Smetana award for composition and the first woman to conduct the Czech Philharmonic. Here in the UK Kaprálová joined the ranks of British composer Dame Ethel Smyth and Nadia Boulanger in conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra before the Second World War.

There's litte doubt that the turbulence of the times in which Kaprálová lived created obstacles in her creative path. She became an exile after the Munich Pact of 1938 and the subsequent onset of the Second World War. Furthermore, like the talented French composer Lili Boulanger some twenty years earlier, Kaprálová's life was cut short; she died in France in 1940, at the age of just twenty-five. Nonetheless she was able to compose quickly and naturally, so a sizeable legacy exists of some fifty works, spread across vocal, chamber, solo piano and orchestral forms. Donald Macleod explores Vítezslava Kaprálová's extraordinary story with Karla Hartl, the founder of The Kaprálová Society.

Vítezslava Kaprálová arrived in Prague with a considerable reputation; she had graduated from Brno Conservatory as a prize-winning student, with a piano concerto that she conducted herself. Now in Prague she furthered her studies and also made good use of the broader cultural activities available in that vibrant city. With Donald Macleod and Karla Hartl, the founder of The Kaprálová Society.

Grotesque Passacaglia
Tomás Víšek, piano

Apple from the Lap, Op.10
Dana Burešová, soprano
Timothy Cheek, piano

String Quartet, Op.8 (1st movement, Con brio)
Škampa Quartet

Piano Concerto in D Minor, Op.7
Alice Rajnohová, piano
Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic Orchestra
Tomáš Hanus, conductor

Vteriny (excerpt), Op.18
Olena Tokar, soprano
Igor Gryshyn, piano.