This is a fascinating and entertaining, if stylistically somewhat uncertain, work by a Central European composer just coming to terms with the new neo-Classical trends of Paris.

Martinu wrote the Concertino about a year after he moved to Paris in search of an artistic milieu that was interested in present-day music, also hoping to study with Albert Roussel. There he adapted to the new, Stravinsky-led neo-Classical movement, but it took more than a couple of years to integrate its sound with his own strong musical personality.

He also kept in contact with Czech musical friends, especially Stanislav Novak, the concertmaster of the Czech Philharmonic. Novak had founded a string quartet whose cellist was Mauritius Frank. Martinu was very impressed with the Dutch cellist's playing and wrote this 14-minute, one-movement concertino in hopes he would play it. Meanwhile, he also strove to accommodate the current Parisian taste for neo-Classicism.

Led by Igor Stravinsky, this movement was a new compositional style that stressed small, often wind-based ensembles more akin in size to the chamber orchestras of the eighteenth century than the lush, sweeping Romantic orchestra. It also turned its back on the Romantic-era notion that art was to express the personal travails of the Artist. Neo-Classical composers embraced an ideal of the composer as an artisan. These ideas also represented a turning away from attitudes that younger people in Europe saw as representing the old society that had spawned the war in which their generation was butchered.

Even better, neo-Classicism was in many ways an opposite of the increasingly atonal Expressionist style that was emerging from German and Austria. In Paris, these were the hated enemy nations in the recent war.

Martinu's Concertino audibly strains to accommodate his Austrian-based training to this anti-Austrian musical idea. The orchestra emulates Stravinsky in its choice of piccolo, two oboes, two clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, timpani, snare drum, cymbals, and piano in addition to the solo cello. Martinu's bright, energetic, personal rhythmic style—a constant throughout his life—was quite different from the chugging neo-Baroque rhythms of much of the other music current in Paris.

The themes are tuneful, rather jittery, and in themselves rather personally expressive; there is already a sense that Martinu misses some things about his homeland. He yokes them to the tartly dissonant harmonic style—"wrong notes" often grafted on to Haydnesque chord progressions. And his characteristic use of piano and rather overused percussion adds a brittleness that is a weakness here.

Yet the concertino works and does strike one as a genuine statement by a composer who has something to say. Martinu may have tried to submerge his artistic personality in this music, but it comes through, and makes the work fascinating, entertaining, and very much worth listening to despite its unformed style.

Frank never played the Concertino. It had to wait 25 years for its premiere, which was by Ivan Vectomov and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra under Vaclav Neumann on March 24, 1949.

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