This exceptional triple concerto was utterly lost and forgotten for 30 years when its posthumous premiere revealed it as a missing masterpiece by one of the most individual and important composers of the twentieth century. Its style is the spicy, polytonal modernism of Paris in the '20s and '30s, along with a full measure of neo-Baroque elements. Martinu (born in Bohemia, now the Czech Republic, in 1890, and died in Basel in 1959) wrote this concerto in the tenth year of his residence in Paris. This triple concerto blends all the elements that had mixed in his music during that decade. The music is securely tonal; it would be years before Paris embraced the atonal and serial experiments of the Viennese composers of the day. Martinu quickly wrote this concerto once he received a commission for a concerto from the Hungarian Trio. He completed the full score on time, but was unable to find the manuscript to deliver it as agreed. The Hungarian Trio accepted his request to let him write a work to substitute. Martinu wrote it in just 11 days. It was in the same key and the same basic four-movement layout as the concerto. These facts led some researchers to believe that when Martinu wrote of his "concertino" and his "concerto," he was referring to the same work. The concertino's score eventually made its way to the Martinu archives in his hometown of Policka. After musicologist Harry Halbreich studied the original score there, Martinu's widow got in touch with him in 1962 and said she had discovered another work in her husband's effects. Halbreich determined that it was another concerted work for trio and string orchestra and arranged its premiere by the Festival String Lucerne under Rudolf Baumgartner in 1963. It was acclaimed as one of Martinu's strongest works from the highly polyphonic, chamber orchestra-oriented years in the early '30s. The four-movement work lasts 25 minutes. The opening Poco Allegro is muscular with strong, propulsive bass lines. It only partly uses the concerto grosso form. By a good margin, the longest movement, the Andante, starts with a serious but richly harmonized solo that is succeeded by a lonely variant of it for the two string soloists. The third movement, Scherzo, Allegro, is a work in classic scherzo form with a trio middle section for the soloists alone and a literal repeat of the opening section. The movement is full of the feeling of the Classical-era Scherzo, but its sound is anything but. Shifting accents and other rhythmic tricks make it firmly twentieth century. The finale, Moderato, poco allegro, does begin a bit like a crib from one of the Brandenburg Concerto and there is more tendency to use the trio as a separate group. Canons and other contrapuntal devices abound, but still keep the tart harmonies of the polytonal era.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide