Suk: Prague - A Summer's Tale

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players. Late Romantic composer Josef Suk, Antonín Dvorak’s son-in-law, wrote a substantial body of works, many of them bold and ambitious and deserving of a place in the modern repertory. Suk has no greater champion today than his Czech compatriot, Jiri Belohlávek. Following up his previous Chandos release coupling Suk’s Symphony No.1 with Ripening, here Belohlávek presents two substantial symphonic poems, again with ‘his’ BBC Symphony Orchestra – the excellent studio recordings were made in January 2012, eight months before he was due to stand down as the orchestra’s Chief Conductor of six years. Suk’s best known orchestral work, the mournful Asrael Symphony, was written in memory of Dvorak and his daughter Otilka – Suk’s wife – whose deaths within months of each other in 1904 devastated the composer. The double tragedy occurred while Suk was already planning a new piece, one which subsequently reflected