Kensington Symphony Orchestra performs Czech Myths and Legends

KSO - one of London's finest non-professional orchestras - returns to St John’s Smith Square on Monday 27 November in a performance of Martinů’s Symphony No.3 (1944).

Written during a summer retreat in Connecticut, the symphony was dedicated to Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who gave the première in 1945. Featuring shimmering, luminous orchestral textures and a haunting chorale for solo string quartet, the work, which progresses from a dark opening in E flat minor to a bright conclusion in E major, takes a joyful turn in the finale – ascribed to news of the Allied landing in Normandy that June.

The programme opens with Dvořák’s The Wood Dove (1896, rev. 1897) – the composer’s fourth orchestral poem, premièred under the baton of fellow Czech composer Janáček in 1898. Drawing on a ballad by the Czech poet Karel Jaromír Erben, it is an evocation of the story of a woman who poisons her lover, then remarries, but is overcome by guilt and takes her own life.

The orchestra also performs Janáček’s rhapsody Taras Bulba (1915, rev. 1918), based on Nikolai Gogol’s novel about the 17th-century Cossack-Polish war. Evoking the deaths of two of the title character’s sons, and finally his own, the work includes episodes of turbulent passion, a wild mazurka, a limping march and stirring passages for brass, organ and bells.