Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.
This week’s pick from the Naxos label (8.557494) is of a song by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959). During the 1930s and early 1940s Martinů moved away from his usual idiom, which was heavily pervaded by French influences, towards one in which the folklore of both his native Bohemia and further afield in Central Europe played a significant role. Composed in 1932, Peach Blossom treats Chan Yo Sun’s poem concerning the claustrophobic heaviness of summer, encapsulated in the lengthy piano prelude, to an elaborate setting which persuasively mingles languidness with anxiety.