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Together with the opera The Players and Piano Concertos Nos. 2, 3, Musica d’inverno (Winter Music) is another posthumously premiered piece by Juraj Beneš. The title associates Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons or even Novák’s Autumn Symphony and you might ask why the composer chose a season of repose, symbol of darkness, night, slumber, or even death for the title of his concerto? Why did he choose it in 1992, when the excitement generated by the Velvet Revolution was being slowly crushed by problems that were vented in the atmosphere of newly gained free speech. Is all this present in Beneš’s work? Maybe it is. Winter Music reflects the title, just as Vivaldi’s work, by pictorial means, such as tremolos, trills or glissandi in both the solo and the accompaniment, chromatic scales in high-register winds, or the richly scored percussion section, which supports the atmosphere with rolls on various cymbals and drums, the brilliant sound of triangles, sustained bells, vibraphone or marimbaphone. All this we find in the musical horizon of Winter Music, but other objects of the composer’s imagination are in the foreground: echoes of plainchant in the solo instrument, in the string section, and later also the wind section; the Phrygian mode evokes Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms or the more recent Symphony No. 3 by H. M. Górecki, which had a strong impact on younger generations. The enusing developmental sections reminds us again of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, with its ostentatious dissonant diatonic movement. Aleatoric blocks of superimposed thirds suggest Lutosławski. In the harsh context of its origin, Winter Music harks back to the times of discovery of new models and symbols of independence from prescribed aesthetics in the 1960s. The atmosphere of reminiscences is slowly invaded by chromaticism in a dense polyphonic texture, which is in turn transformed by the octave transpositions of the violin into a broad melodic line of sevenths and ninths. It is here that Winter Music falls into its proper epoch. As a common feature of much of Beneš’s music, at the heart of this work there is the combination of a broad melody featuring the motive made up of a minor third and an augmented fifth, i.e. the first, third and seventh degrees of the minor scale (a Suchonian intonation of the orchestral tutti with the dominating violin), and a Mephistophelean scherzando, which we are so familiar with from earlier Beneš Works, and which this time dissolves into a chilling tremolo.


\n (Vladimír Bokes, in: booklet of the CD \"Milan Paľa\", Music Centre Slovakia R 350025-2-131, p. 12–13.)
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