Few works have had quite so bizarre a performance history as Ma Vlast, Smetana's cycle of six thematically related symphonic poems, which forms the national epic of Czech music. Interweaving archetypal legend with a depiction of the Bohemian landscape, it ranks among the towering achievements of 19th-century music, though its reception outside the Czech-speaking world has been mixed, largely due to an irritating revisionist attitude to much of Smetana's work.
Generations of musicians and audiences have fought shy of the mythic elements in Smetana's music, seeing him as primarily folksy and cute. Just as The Bartered Bride is erroneously deemed typical of an operatic output that frequently aspires to Wagnerian resonance, so we find a hefty over-emphasis put on the two landscape portraits in Ma Vlast - Vltava and From Bohemia's Woods and Fields - which are often played separately, out of context.
We hear the complete cycle all too rarely in the UK. Colin Davis's performance with the London Symphony Orchestra was eagerly awaited, though it was hampered by what can only be described as a perverse halfway-house approach. Someone inserted an interval, dangerously undermining the cumulative impact. It also came at the most inopportune point, at the end of Sarka, Smetana's portrait of the psychotic Amazonian warrior who seduces her enemies in order to slaughter them. Sarka does, it is true, whip up a frenzied climax at the centre of the work, but if you stop at this point, you miss Smetana's extraordinary plunge from its violence into the luxuriant opulence of From Bohemia's Woods and Fields, one of the most powerfully affecting structural juxtapositions in all music.
The overall effect was of six separate pieces rather than a cohesive whole. This was a shame, for Davis's approach is often admirable. Unlike many interpreters he seems happiest with the mythic rather than the pictorial. The first section, Vysehrad (the ancient fortress in Prague), had a magisterial beauty and the sadomasochistic oscillations of Sarka had a dangerous, tingly sexuality, with its great clarinet solo - first erotic, then rearing in hideous triumph - played to perfection.
From Bohemia's Woods and Fields, however, had a glitzy quality that occasionally detracted from its mixture of sensual indolence and riotous fun. The great river Vltava, meanwhile, didn't so much flow as be occasionally subject to some rather strange gear changes, though its central section had a wonderfully lustrous sensuousness. The playing throughout was immaculate.
