Novák - Toman and the Wood Nymph, etc review | Andrew Clements's classical album of the week

The Guardian 80

Jan Bartoš/Prague Radio SO/Jakub Hrůša
(Supraphon)
‘Vítězslav Novák is worth knowing about and we must play his music,’ says Hrůša, and the later works have a pictorial energy that is vividly realised here

‘I will be standing up for Novák from now on,” writes conductor Jakub Hrůša. “Novák is worth knowing about, and we must play his music.” This is Vítězslav Novák (1870-1949), who was a pupil of Dvořák in Prague, and one of the young composers, alongside Suk and Janáček, who joined a group of artists and writers to publish a “Czech manifesto of modernism” in 1895.