The tragically short life and career of late nineteenth-century Hungarian-born violinist and composer Ottokar Eugen Novácek is today remembered by very few, and even then usually only on the merit of a single work: the Perpetuum mobile for violin and orchestra, or alternately violin and piano. Novácek was a gifted violinist, certainly, and an equally gifted composer (perhaps more gifted—we shall never really know, as he took up composition on a full-time basis only during the last year of his life, when his failing heart forced him to abandon the violin; still, his Piano Concerto was taken up by no less a giant than Ferruccio Busoni), and the Perpetuum mobile proves that gift on both counts.

It is of course a virtuoso showpiece; but, unlike so many such display pieces, every little note seems to be flawlessly placed, perfectly calculated to draw the maximum effect from violinist and accompaniment. The dramatic, descending chromatic idea from which the entire Perpetuum mobile is derived is like an unstoppable juggernaut that just won't go away—here it is immediate and pressing, there it is fainter and more distant, here it is temporarily abandoned for one of a handful of subsidiary ideas (the finest of which is probably a clever hemiola idea in rising quarter notes that the orchestra mumbles underneath the soloist's arpeggios), but never is its presence altogether absent. Bombast, obsessive frenzy, and mysterious quietude are admirably balanced throughout Novácek's Perpetuum mobile, most notably at the wonderful point at which the opening is reprised two-thirds of the way through the piece—the bottom suddenly drops out of a frantic, dissonant, triple-forte explosion and the violin is left alone, pianissimo, but still creating a dazzling shower of sixteenth notes.

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