Rejcha: Wind Quintets

Following their critically acclaimed debut album, the Belfiato Quintet have gone back a century in time, to the “father of the wind quintet” Antonín Rejcha’s life was adventurous and turbulent indeed. When he was 10, he ran away from his Prague home, and would live in turn in Bonn, Hamburg and Vienna, before finally settling in Paris. He presented his first symphony at the tender age of 17. Rejcha became a friend of Beethoven’s, who played the viola in the same orchestra, he made the acquaintance with Haydn, and his teachers included Salieri. A keen experimenter, he liked to write in quintuple time, was fascinated by Gypsy music with micro-intervals, playing with numbers and chords, polyrhythm, polytonality and counterpoint. Moreover, he was an accomplished theorist and a renowned teacher, also working as a professor at the Conservatoire de Paris. His students included Liszt, Berlioz, Franck and other distinguished composers. Rejcha was the first to write truly masterful wind quintets, making full use of the instruments’ timbres and technical potential. Notwithstanding its being challenging to perform, his music comes across as bright, airy and gracious. The Belfiato Quintet selected three – the most beautiful and most engrossing – of Rejcha’s 24 wind quintets, which they have recorded at the acoustically exceptionable Rudolfinum hall in Prague. It would seem that the virtuoso and passionate musicians have found in Rejcha a kindred spirit.

The Belfiato Quintet is made up of players of renowned orchestras (Czech Philharmonic, National Theatre Orchestra, PKF – Prague Philharmonia, State Opera Orchestra, Prague Symphony Orchestra, Pardubice Chamber Philharmonic and Philharmonia Orchestra, London). They have garnered accolades at international competitions, including the ARD competition in Munich, Prague Spring and Concertino Praga. The Belfiato Quintet won the Antonín Rejcha Prize in Semmering. In 2011, the ensemble came third at the Henri Tomasi International Wind Competition in Marseille, where they also received the prize for the best performance of a Tomasi work.

The Belfiato Quintet: Oto Reiprich – flute, Jan Souček – oboe, Jiří Javůrek – clarinet, Ondřej Šindelář – bassoon, Kateřina Javůrková – French horn