In describing the performance of three extraordinary pieces by the Czech composer Pavel Novák, I have to begin by declaring an interest in my capacity as Artistic Director of the Deal Summer Music Festival, at which he was a featured composer. Novák was born in Brno in 1957, and has achieved a high reputation in Moravia, where he is now acknowledged to be the leading composer of his generation. He is not yet well known outside the Czech Republic, although the Schubert Ensemble have commissioned three pieces from him – Lord, We Seek the Song of the Chosen for piano trio (1991); Royal Funeral Procession to Iona for piano quintet (1995); St Mary Variations for piano quartet (2000) – and have played them in Britain and abroad. Novák's teacher, Miloslav IÎtvan, was a pupil of Janáček's pupil Jaroslav Kvapil, and Novák, more than any other composer in Moravia, seems the true inheritor of the Janáček tradition. That tradition remains a vital force in Brno, partly because Janáček is the most local of composers and his music still, and in a vital way, haunts his home town with its Janáček Academy (where Novak studied), and the Janáček Theatre (where Novak played the oboe for a number of years in the opera orchestra) at which Janáček's operas are performed as nowhere else, players and singers alike attuned to the Moravian dialect; partly through the continuing vitality of Moravian folksong, whose spirit and melodic contours inform Novák's music as they did Janáček's.