Martinů’s completion of five symphonies between 1942 and 1946 can have a disconcerting, even deterrent, effect on anyone approaching these works for the first time. The statistic suggests that, having held back from the form until he was 52, Martinů began to treat it flippantly, creating ‘production-line’ works until he lost interest. Since Beethoven’s time, it has been more usual for symphonic works to punctuate a composer’s career at significant intervals, allowing one to chart the evolution of his symphonic style, the variations in what he chooses to say and his way of saying it. Sibelius, for instance, wrote only one more symphony than Martinů , but his cycle spans a quarter of a century, from 1899 to 1924, progressing from the romanticism of the first two Symphonies, through the neo-Classical asperity of the Third and Fourth, to the intense expressive and thematic concentration of the Seventh. These works are mighty milestones in one of the greatest symphonic careers of the twentieth century and are all rightly regarded as essential listening.

By contrast, Martinů’s clutch of five symphonies in as many years encourages the view that each of them is somehow dispensable. Surely these works, so tightly packed together, will not differ much from one another in style or substance, and therefore it is not important to know them all? Admittedly, it is easy to hear that they all belong to one phase of his development, but not one is a slavish copy of any of its predecessors. Each offers a unique listening experience, and nothing demonstrates this fact more clearly than the work he penned during a summer retreat to Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1944. One might have imagined that the Second Symphony, with its slight proportions and its integration of concerto grosso principles, would have served him well as the basis of his future symphonic style, yet the Third is poles apart from it both in content and formal layout. It is easily his darkest and most forbidding Symphony, which may explain why it is the least popular and most seldom performed. Its relatively low profile is a shame, as it is arguably his finest Symphony – a work of which he was very proud.