(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Music open thread: Sinfoniette [1] ['Alonso Del Arte', 'Greg Dworkin'] Date: 2026-08-10 Victors write the history books, and sometimes they also draw the maps. After World War II, Germany was split into two countries. Germany lost control of occupied territories like Czechoslovakia, a nation that had been created after World War I by joining the Czechs and the Slovaks into a single nation. Though the union of the Czechs and Slovaks was their own idea, there was some tension from the beginning, with the Slovaks worrying they would always come in second, not just in the name of the nation. But it looked like this alliance would hold, and maybe even stand the test of time. It might have looked that way to Leoš Janáček, a composer who was born in Hukvaldy (Hochwald, or “high woods” to the Germans) in 1854. Hukvaldy’s not far from the lands of the Slovaks. If you hear something vaguely military about Janáček’s Sinfonietta, written in 1926, that might have something to do with the fact that he dedicated it to the Československá armáda (the Czechoslovak Armed Forces, according to IMSLP). This performance of Janáček’s Sinfonietta by Karina Canellakis conducting the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest seemed a little too slow to me in its total duration, since it’s almost ten minutes longer than the recording in my iTunes collection, but she brings out details in the finale that I just hadn’t noticed… wait a minute… my iTunes collection has been missing the entire finale for who knows how long! It turns out that Cannelakis is about middle of the pack in terms of duration. But in my opinion, she’s got one of the best performances of this piece on YouTube. Czech composer Vítězslava Kaprálová was born in 1915 in Brno, where Janáček lived most of his life, and about the same distance from the lands of the Slovaks as Hukvaldy. Her life was too short. It’s believed that her death, in 1940, was caused by typhoid fever. That’s a disease that is fairly rare in America. Unless Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has anything to say about that. Kaprálová’s lifespan corresponded quite closely with the duration of the First Czechoslovak Republic. In her short life, she managed to create an oeuvre that is impressive even if we ignore her childhood compositions. For opus numbers she actually got to Opus 25, which is two more than the longer-lived Clara Schumann. There’s not much of her music on IMSLP, but that’s a situation that might change in the future. In another parallel to Janáček, Kaprálová wrote her Military Sinfonietta, Opus 11, in one of the final years of her life. Her sinfonietta is also scored for a fairly large orchestra. Though she uses nine trumpets and one trombone fewer than Janáček, she does use two more horns in F (the so-called “French horns”) than he does. A sinfonietta should be in some way smaller than a full-fledged symphony. That can be a matter of a shorter duration or a smaller number of musicians. Or it can be both of those, as in the case of Albert Roussel’s Sinfonietta for Strings, Opus 52, which is roughly half as long as his Fourth Symphony and obviously doesn’t use winds or percussion. In the case of Korngold’s Sinfonietta in B-flat major, Opus 5, the smallness is a matter of somewhat less seriousness. Depending on the interpretations, a performance of Korngold’s Sinfonietta might run longer and use more instruments than a performance of Korngold’s very serious Symphony in F-sharp. George Whitefield Chadwick’s Sinfonietta in D major uses a slightly larger orchestra than his Third Symphony, but runs about half as long, depending on the interpretations, and is definitely in a lighter mood. It could have just as easily have been titled as a serenade. I couldn’t find a video on YouTube that I like. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Third Programme, the British Broadcasting Corporation commissioned Francis Poulenc to write a new piece. Apparently he wasn’t feeling all that inspired, so he drew on some music he had previously written and discarded to meet the assignment. I wouldn’t have figured that from listening to this Sinfonietta. In this performance from four years ago, it looks like everyone not playing a wind instrument is wearing a mask, including the conductor. They were taking the coronavirus pandemic seriously in Spain. Just today I learned that Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks wrote a sinfonietta. The name sounds familiar. Maybe it was in connection to Ralph Vaughan Williams that I saw her name. So far I have only listened to her Etruscan Concerto. I’m postponing the open thread about sinfonie concertante to next week. 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