6 Klänge aus Mähren (nach Dvoraks mährischen Duetten); The Wild Duck; Elegy on the Death of my Daughter Olga; Nursery Rhymes; The Wolf's Trail; Our Evenings; Ave Maria; Our Father

Songs of the Czech soul
On the one hand, Leoš Janáček's music is firmly anchored in Western music history and the major trends of his time, but it also bears witness to his deep roots in his native Czech language and the folk music traditions of his homeland.

Like Smetana, who was thirty years his senior, and his peer Dvořák, Leoš Janáček was also a fervent advocate of the Czech cause. Already active as a choirmaster at a young age, he was choirmaster of the Umělecká beseda (Artistic Association), one of the oldest Czech cultural associations, from 1876. In 1877, Janáček and Dvořák became close friends, the first expression of which was the choral arrangement of Dvořák's Moravian Duets ("Sounds from Moravia" for voice and piano). Janáček was an avid collector of Czech folk music and drew inspiration from the immensely rich sources of folk songs and fairy tales, folk dances and peasant nursery rhymes of the Bohemian and Moravian tradition to conjure up a mood alternating between melancholy and cheerfulness with chromatic harmonies.

However, his choral music also contains personal confessions: When his daughter Olga died in 1903 at the age of 20, a friend of Olga's expressed her shock in verses, which the composer immediately set to music. The musical obituary for the daughter is a gentle reflection on death, which speaks of the beautiful and peaceful face of the young girl who has fallen asleep forever and of the victory of the "spirit over death". The distinctly dramatic Czech "Our Father" expresses both Janáček's religiosity and his Czech patriotism by quoting a Hussite chorale. This CD thus reflects a musical language that is deeply rooted in Eastern Europe and yet has been able to create a universal emotional world for almost a century.