String Quartet No.2 “Wild Mountain Thyme” (first performance)

Jig

Wild Mountain Thyme

Reel

Pavel Fischer writes: “My love for folk music dates to my very early youth. I was born in Moravia, where traditional music is still very alive, and I was    brought up in an environment where singing and playing folk music really matter. Even during my classical music studies and during my    nearly 20 years as leader of the Skampa Quartet I always found time for my passion, playing with folk bands and arranging folk-song encores for my quartet. The combination of my folk inclination and my fascination for    the string quartet eventually led to the composition of my first original piece, the “Morava” String Quartet. “ Like “Morava”, the second string quartet, “Wild Mountain Thyme”, is inspired by folk music. Whereas “Morava“ was based on traditional Moravian Slovakian and Gypsy music, however, the ideas in the new work come from Scottland and Ireland. The first    movement opens with an imitation of the Celtic whistle, which is then juxtaposed with satirical modernistic dissonances. This resolves into a simple jig which is occasionally invaded by more dissonant attacks. The battle finally resolves into a marriage of the two elements. In the middle movement, a set of variations on the Scottish song “Go Lassie, Go”, tradition is turned on its head: the most distant variations begin the movement and the lyrical theme completes it. The finale is a wild reel dancing ecstatically towards the end”.