[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: This is Hannah DePriest welcoming you to the first exclusive Salon Era podcast episode of the 202526 season.
This time around, we're bringing you highlights from the Les Delys concert season opener Bohemian Rhapsody this intimate, colorful chamber music program for oboe and strings celebrates little known Bohemian and Moravian composers, along with the classical era's most enduring genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Honoring self expression and cultural difference, the program explores themes of separation, nostalgia and homecoming through folk tunes and other traces of Czech cultural identity.
The musicians for this program include director and oboist Deborah Nagy, violinist Shelby Yamin, violist Yael Cinemo, and cellist Rebecca Landell.
Throughout the podcast today, you'll hear selections recorded live at Bohemian Rhapsody in October 2025, plus conversations with Ladalist director Deborah Nagy and musicologist Martine Nedbell.
Let's kick things off with a little background from Deborah Nagy.
Deborah, it's great to talk to you. This is the first concert of our 202526 season, which you have titled Metamorph.
Talk to me a little bit about what makes this season for you a metamorphosis.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Well, I do feel like Les Delisa's programming has evolved in some interesting ways. And as an organization we keep evolving, taking on new challenges in most recently investing more resources and energy into education.
And there are also these themes of metamorphosis or something, you know, starting in one form and changing and being transformed.
That kind of popped up as I was across the course of the concert season.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: As I mentioned, Bohemian Rhapsody marks the beginning of this concert season metamorphosis, but it's also the third in a recent line of classical era instrumental programs, starting back in 2021 with Winds of Change.
Then we had Moonlit Mozart, which was our wildly popular wind octet program.
How do you see Bohemian Rhapsody fitting into that as a kind of new venture for Les Delys?
[00:02:33] Speaker A: Les Delices is always kind of interested in telling unusual stories through music. And when I say stories, I mean histories and kind of cultural stories and histories. And in the case of Bohemian Rhapsody, like so many other programs are interested putting a spotlight on unusual names. So in this program, you know, we have Franz Kroemer and Georg Drusetzky. We get to consider their music on its own terms.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: It's definitely one of those programs where even if you're an avid consumer of classical music and you consider yourself a superfan or even a professional musician like myself, I didn't recognize any of the names on the program except for Mozart and Nathan Mondrie, of course, who's a friend of mine.
But I'd love to talk first about your enthusiasm for Juschezky. And his first movement of his Quartet in G minor for Oboe and Strings is the first piece we'll hear shortly.
So in your program notes, you're a bit fawning. Deborah, you call this piece remarkable, and you describe the quartet as a wild roller coaster ride. How did you first encounter Drushetzky and why did you want to feature him so prominently in this program?
[00:03:54] Speaker A: Honestly, I had not heard of Drushetzky until my oboe teacher in Holland, Alfredo Bernardini, handed me the score and parts to this quartet some 20, 20 some years ago.
And Druszewski, I mean, it's a really, really excellent piece of music in every single movement. We're going to hear the first movement, but several things I'd like to point out about it. First of all, this is a quartet in G minor. Now, chamber music for winds and chamber music even for winds and strings. You know, whether that's oboe quartets or quintets or various things, they're almost exclusively in major. Even you think about, like the symphonies of Mozart, he wrote 41 of them and only two of them are not in major keys. So whenever there's a choice to write a piece in a minor key, it's a very distinctive one, one that has a lot of passion and pathos potentially behind it. Now also, quartets kind of qualify in the, in the scheme of things, as a kind of divertimento, basically a very light genre. So you expect it to be like, easy and pleasing to listen to and not too complicated, formally or otherwise.
And in this case with this G minor quartet by Druszewski, it actually is structured like a symphony first movement with a slow introduction and a whole sonata form that follows that. And when you consider that this quartet by Druszewski is not only just one of 16 oboe quartets by Druszewski, but also Druszewski wrote 47 string quartets and 27 symphonies. I mean, this is someone who's incredibly prolific, incredibly creative. You know, we should all come away from this Druszewski quartet thinking, oh my gosh, why don't I know more about or why haven't I played more Druszewski? The last thing that I will say about Drushevsky, I know I write in the program notes that he was a certified regional drummer.
He wrote some of the first.
He wrote the first concertos for timpani.
He also wrote a concerto for oboe and timpani which one evening after performance of Bohemian Rhapsody, Les Delices members me, Shelby, Allison Monroe and Rebecca Landell. Allison looked up this Concerto for Oboe and TimPani on YouTube, which you can find. There's a fabulous live performance and it is amazing. I mean hilarious.
This concerto for like oboe and eight timpani, but the timpani part is unbelievable. Like with eight timpani you essentially have a scale. It's like this timpani player is essentially playing bass lines and the double cadenza for oboe and timpani is out of this world.
I was amazed and I think the music is serious.
It's funny, it's so many things and it deserves to be better known.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: If we've piqued your interest, that Concerto for Oboe and Timpani by Georg Juiceky, you can find that on YouTube. The the recording is by Kohlberg Percussion. But before you run off to another platform, let's give a listen now to Georg Jutsky's Quartet in G minor for Oboe and Strings. This is Movement one, recorded live by Les Delys.
Are you enjoying the music on today's episode? Well, I have great news. More incredible 18th century music from Ladalise is streaming now on our VHX platform all month long, so through the end of November 2025 you can stream the entire beautifully filmed concert Winds of Change in High definition on demand for just $20.
This is an exclusive re release from the Ladalis Vault that makes the perfect companion to Bohemian Rhapsody.
Visit Lesdalice VHX TV to reserve your access and thanks so much for listening to this episode of Salon Era, which features excerpts from a live performance by les delices from October 2025.
In a moment we'll get some insights from musicologist Dr. Martine Nedball and hear some more music. But in the meantime, I hope you'll consider making a tax deductible gift to Salonira.
With your support, we can continue to collaborate with engaging artists from across the country and around the world.
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We are so excited to be speaking with Dr. Martine Nedball, who is a musicologist and scholar at the University of Kansas. Well Martine, I would love to know a little bit more about your research. One of the reasons we're excited to speak with you is that your interests and what you've written on so perfectly dovetail with the repertoire and the kind of historical period of Bohemian Rhapsody.
[00:14:11] Speaker C: So I'm originally from the Czech Republic, but I have actually lived in the United States since 1998. I came here for college and.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: It.
[00:14:25] Speaker C: Took me some time before I settled on musicology.
I basically discovered the discipline only for my PhD, which I did at the Eastman School of Music in upstate New York.
And when I was trying to figure out what to focus on in musicology, I was sort of torn because obviously I wanted to explore my Czech heritage and explore Czech music. But then I was also really interested in 18th century opera.
And so then initially I focused on Mozart and I wrote a lot about Mozart's operas in Vienna and specifically German operas.
And maybe we will get to why a Czech person would be interested in German culture, because I think later we might talk about how German culture is extremely important for the Czech lands.
And then as I progressed in my career, I started to turn or focus more and more on Czech, specifically Czech music as well.
And so I have written quite a bit about Mozart in Vienna. I have published also a book about Mozart in the reception of Mozart's operas in Prague, because Mozart, he lived most of the time, most of his life or the last decade of his life, he spent in Vienna.
But then Prague was a very important city for him.
And so I wrote about that. But then I have written quite a bit also about Czech music. So most recently I edited this collection of essays that is called the History of Music in the Czech Lands. And also next year, and I'll be publishing this edited biography of the Czech composer Bedrij Smetana.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: When you say Czech Lands and when we talk about Bohemia and Bohemian in terms of this program, can you kind of talk me through what exactly we're referring to in the last decades of the 18th century, specifically?
[00:16:52] Speaker C: So it's a very complicated issue.
It's political, it's very nationalistic, and sometimes it's also very controversial.
So we in fact experienced that when we worked on the book A History of Music in the Czech Lands because we were not sure what to call it, because obviously nowadays it's the Czech Republic. But the Czech Republic has been around only since 1993.
And then before that it was part of Czechoslovakia, which was created in 1918 after the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy.
And it was just a country that never existed before, that was basically carved out of bits and pieces of the Austro Hungarian Empire.
But then what is now the Czech Republic thus consists of two regions that were basically always together throughout history, and that is Bohemia and Moravia. And so then the Bohemia is the western part, and Moravia is the eastern part of the Czech Republic. The name Bohemia, in fact, goes all the way back to the Celts, who lived in the region during the Roman time. And so the Romans eventually called that region Bohemia.
But then in the 6th century, these Slavic people moved there, who were the predecessors of the current Czechs.
And so then these Slavic people eventually created a kingdom which was called the Kingdom of the Bohemian Crown.
And eventually the crown went to the Habsburgs, who also had the crowns of Hungary and also ruled in Austria. And so the Habsburgs created the Austrian, or Habsburg Empire.
And basically the Kingdom of the Bohemian Crown was dissolved within this empire. The independent state was Recreated only in 1918 as Czechoslovakia, though, with this extra country of Slovakia.
And so it's just a very complicated history.
Also, the problem with calling it the Czech Lands is that it wasn't just the Czechs who lived in that territory. So there was a large German population in what is now the Czech Republic.
And so that's why calling it Bohemia and Moravia or Bohemian Lands, in a way reflects the fact that it wasn't ethnically homogeneous.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: It's a good reminder, I think. We tend to view the world through the maps that we grew up learning geography through. But these things were far more malleable over time than maybe we can fully understand looking at a map today in 2025, definitely. And how crazy that it's changed, you know, from how much it's changed from 1985, say, to today, especially in this region of Eastern Europe that we're talking about. We talked a little bit about the borders, but can we talk about language?
Because, as you said, or I would assume, when the Austro or the Habsburg Empire comes into being, is there a process of, like, making everyone speak German, or are people's languages kind of still being spoken, or what languages are people speaking in this region?
[00:20:41] Speaker C: So the traditional narrative that became prominent, especially after 1918, when Czechoslovakia was created and the Czechs finally had their own state, was that under the Habsburgs, there was a lot of Germanization and people were forced to speak German, but it was definitely more complicated than that. So German was definitely the main official language of the Habsburg Empire, and whoever wanted to do a career as a state official need to speak German. But then, in fact, there was, especially in the 19th century, there was quite a bit of support for the Czech language as well.
[00:21:34] Speaker B: So. Well, I mean, I'm a little scared to ask you this question, Martin, given everything that you've said, but so. And thank you for challenging these sort of simplistic ideas around history for us, because I think it's really important to do that. But do you feel like there are any sort of qualities then or like, useful ways of thinking about this music by these Moravian and Bohemian composers as, like, I don't know, are there any sort of things, nationalistic qualities at all in what they wrote? Or you think, no, they were 18th century cosmopolitan composers?
[00:22:14] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great question and also very, very difficult question.
So there are certainly national and nationalistic qualities in the music by Czech composers from the 19th century. People like Dvorak Smetana, we know that they were trying to write music that was nationalistic, and so they used specific approaches to do that.
But in the 18th century it's much more difficult to say because when you listen to a certain composition by a Bohemian composer of Czech background, it's very hard to necessarily find any specific features that make it sound different from a Bohemian composer of a German background or of an Austrian composer.
And so it's just a very difficult question.
And then many times people try to talk about folk music as the basis for what sometimes is called art music, or sometimes it's referred to as highbrow music or just the classical music tradition.
But then the problem is that we can really, it's impossible to check whether there are any folk tunes in music from the 18th century, because specifically in Bohemia, folk tunes started to be written down only in the 19th century. And so we have really no idea what folk tunes, what folk songs were performed and sung in the 18th century. And so there's just like no correlation. And I'm not saying that it didn't happen.
I'm just saying that we have no proof that it happened.
The other thing also is that we, in fact, it's quite likely also that in fact it was the highbrow or art music of the upper classes that in fact influenced the folk music.
So yet another concept that was created in the 19th century, in this nationalistic thought of the 19th century, that somehow folk music influenced classical music because it was considered to be the purist music.
And chances are that it did. But it's also equally possible or equally likely that the classical cosmopolitan music influenced heavily the folk music that the common people performed. Because many of these peasants in the countryside, the way they learned music and picked up instruments was in fact by getting education from their noble.
Well, in the 18th century it was still their lords because they were still serfs at that time. And so they would definitely come into.
They would experience music through the courts of the nobility.
And that was the. Just the fashionable music of the upper classes, the classical style or the baroque style. And so then the question is, does the classical style of the 18th century sound sometimes like folk music because it was influenced by folk music or because it itself influenced folk music?
[00:26:06] Speaker B: That's fascinating, Martin. You are blowing my mind here. There's actually so much that's such a more interesting thing to contemplate, and it also kind of speaks to, like, everyone's experience of life. Like, it's always a little bit more complicated, you know, when you're trying to, like, well, what actually is influencing me in this moment? Or whatever it is, it's always a more tangled ball of yarn. So thank you for your perspective. Now, while Dr. Martin was reluctant to delve into the mindset of our 18th century Bohemians, I really think he'd agree with my next take. Haydn and Mozart clearly had a big influence on Franz Kroemer, the composer of our next selection.
The son of an innkeeper, Cromer studied violin and organ with his uncle in a tiny Moravian village before finding work in Vienna and slowly but surely climbing the professional ranks there.
Ultimately, he achieved the status of imperial court composer and Kapellmeister.
Though he composed prolifically in practically every genre, he's best known today for his chamber music for woodwinds and strings.
And along with Haydn, Cromer was regarded as a leading composer of string quartets. He wrote around 100 of them, and he was also regarded as a rival of Beethoven's. The Quartet in F major for Oboern strings feels fresh and spontaneous, and the melodic conversations between oboe and violin espouse an easy elegance.
So let's listen to the first movement. Allegro.
[00:27:47] Speaker C: Sa.
[00:29:03] Speaker A: Sa sa sa sam sa.
[00:34:28] Speaker B: We are back now with Lady Lys founder and artistic director, Deborah Nagy. Deborah, there's one element of this program that we haven't yet touched on, which is this folk song suite that Ladalise actually commissioned young living composer Nathan Mondri to create.
Now, the concept behind this was if an 18th century composer had had the idea or the inclination to incorporate Czech folk songs into a suite for chamber music for chamber instruments, what that would have sounded like. So what made Nathan the ideal candidate for this suite task?
[00:35:09] Speaker A: Nathan is a wonderful organist and harpsichordist based in New York City who does a lot of composition in historical styles, and he was eager to take this on. So I worked with Nathan to identify some tunes that we thought were interesting for different reasons. And again, we sometimes come to these things with or in a way, we can't help but come to these things with 21st century ideas or concepts about what a folk tune is or what sounds like folk music.
But I think it's important to recognize, you know, the question was, like, what.
What, let's say, indigenous musics might have been in the ears of these composers, you know, working in or growing up in Czech lands in the decades before 1800.
And if you consider that, you know, a book published in the 1850s Records a repertoire from the oral tradition that goes back, let's say, at least a couple of generations, that would hopefully situate those tunes, that music, those cultural associations with the period of music that we're talking about.
So Nathan created an oval quartet for us. He chose three tunes. The tunes themselves, they were interesting to us as 21st century musicians for a couple of reasons, either because the, you know, the basic contour, the melody appealed. I was really interested in.
In tunes that had irregular phrase lengths. So like, instead of two or four bar phrases, they had motives that were three bars long, which we think of as being, you know, identifiable with kind of like traditional musics from Eastern Europe.
So in some cases, it was these kind of rhythmic markers and phrases, structures that were interesting.
So Nathan's suite for us is really a continuous piece of music in three large sections. One is a kind of simple chorale melody or chorale style setting of the first tune. The second tune is given the treatment as a learned fugue. And Nathan, being who Nathan is, who's extremely bright and facile and also very funny and a little bit cheeky, took this tune that begins in A minor and managed to modulate to a flat minor before wending his way back in the course of our fugue. And the last large section or third movement of this piece is a theme and variations, also totally standard 18th century form, particularly for a last movement.
[00:38:23] Speaker B: Well, let's take a listen now to Nathan Mondri's folk song suite, commissioned by Les Delys for Bohemian Rhapsody.
[00:41:16] Speaker A: Sa.
[00:46:28] Speaker B: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Salon Era. This episode was created by executive producer Deborah Nake, associate producer Shelby Yaman, and me, Hannah DePriest, script writer and special projects manager. For this episode, I spoke with Ladalys founder and artistic director Deborah Nagy and musicologist Dr. Martine Nedball.
Support for Salon Era is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the Ohio Arts Council, and audience members like you.
Special thanks to Astri Seidenfeld, our program sponsor for Bohemian Rhapsody. We would also like to thank Arthur Rotatori and Tara Fields who sponsored violinist Shelby Yaman's appearance.
We are especially grateful to our Salon era season sponsors Deborah Malamud, Tom and Marilyn McLaughlin, and Greg Nozen and Brandon Rood.
This episode featured musical performances by Les Delys recorded live in October 2023.
Huge thanks to our audio engineer Andrew Tripp for his recording work at our live concerts. Please subscribe and leave a review on whatever platform you're listening on. It really helps the show. From all of us, thanks for listening and have a great day.
