NDR Symphony Orchestra- Smetana 200

SOMM Recordings is proud to celebrate the bicentennial of Czech composer, Bedrich Smetana, with world-premiere and never-before-released recordings of George Szell conducting the NBC Symphony and Boston Symphony Orchestras. These live performances from the 1940s have been masterfully restored by the critically-acclaimed audio engineer and producer, Lani Spahr. It's impossible to overstate the importance of Smetana to Czech music in particular and musical nationalism in general. He was born on 2 March 1824 in a small town east of Prague, and he came of age at a time of political upheaval that included the 1848 Prague uprising. It was during this period that he began composing nationalistic music. Throughout his life Smetana was dogged by personal tragedy and professional rejection, which drove him for a time to live and work in Sweden. While there, he composed a series of tone poems inspired by military leaders, including Wallenstein's Camp heard on this disc. But Prague kept pull