THE CHAMELEON

Bohuslav Martinů explored one musical form after another.

- BY ALEX ROSS

How does a singular musical personality emerge from an agglomeration of pitches? The characteristic quirks of major composers are easily identified: Beethoven's hammering three- or four-note motives, Schubert's juxtapositions of heavenly melodies and harmonic abysses, Brahms's pensive parallel sixths, Mahler's agonized four-note turns. Even in the case of many-sided figures such as Monteverdi or Stravinsky, who hover between eras and assume various guises, you can pick out the face behind the mask. But it's not enough to develop a set of mannerisms. What matters is how these signatures interact with the more abstract mechanisms that go into the making of large-scale forms. When that happens, we experience a portion of a life unfolding in sound.

The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů, the focus of this summer's Bard Music Festival, at Bard College, had one of those voices which reveal themselves in a matter of seconds. Take the opening of his Second Symphony, from 1943, which the Orchestra Now performed on the festival's first weekend, under the direction of Leon Botstein, Bard's president and chief musical curator. The first violins unfurl a lilting, lightly bopping tune in D minor. Ascending patterns elsewhere in the strings blur the outlines of that governing idea.

The real Martinů giveaway is an underlying buzz of activity in the piano and the harp—D-minor triads mixed with C-sharp-minor, B-flat-major, and E-flat-major ones, suggesting a rickety machinery behind the lyrical action. These and a few other basic elements recur throughout Martinů's œuvre: curt themes, darting rhythms, tangy harmonies, glittering textures.