As a child Zdeněk Chalabala studied the violin and later, while serving in the army, he formed, with the assistance of his pianist mother, a choir for women. Abandoning law in favour of music, he studied with Novak and Hoffman in Prague, before entering the Brno Conservatory where he was a pupil of Neumann and attended Janaček’s master-classes. He graduated in violin, composition and conducting, and taught at the Conservatory himself until 1936. On the one hundredth anniversary of Smetana’s birth in 1924, Chalabala formed an amateur orchestra in his home town of Uherske Hradište. Initially called the Moravian-Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, it gave approximately twenty-five concerts with Chalabala in the towns of Moravia during its first two years and went on to become the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, a major orchestral presence in the region.

In 1925 Chalabala became Neumann’s assistant at the Brno Opera, conducting there from 1926 and becoming chief conductor in 1929, following Neumann’s death. His preference for the Czech and Slavonic operatic repertoire was clearly seen in the numerous successful productions which the theatre mounted under his leadership. These included Borodin’s Prince Igor, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, operas by Rimsky-Korsakov, Foerster and Novak, and contemporary works such as Schulhof’s Flames. The emphasis upon operas with historical and fantastic themes continued when Chalabala moved to the Prague National Theatre in 1936, where, working with Vaclav Talich, he conducted to great effect many such works, especially those involving large choral forces. He has even been called by some the ‘Czech Toscanini’.

Chalabala held three appointments as chief conductor after World War II, at Ostrava (1945– 1947), Brno (1949–1952) and Bratislava (1952–1953), before returning to the National Theatre in Prague as chief conductor in 1953, remaining there until his death in 1962. The company toured with great success to Russia in 1955 and to Germany in 1956, and Chalabala was appointed as a permanent guest conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow for three seasons from 1956. Here he introduced Janaček’s Jenůfa in 1958, and conducted Smetana’s The Bartered Bride and Russian repertoire by Mussorgsky and Shebalin. He also conducted in Leningrad, notably Dvořak’s Rusalka. Among the many premieres that he led in Prague were those of Prokofiev’s The Story of a Real Man and Suchon’s King Svatopluk. As a composer he wrote several orchestral and vocal works and orchestrated Mussorgsky’s Nursery Songs.

Zdenĕk Chalabala was an extremely fine conductor, as his too few recordings fully demonstrate. He possessed an excellent baton technique and prepared meticulously. In addition to achieving excellent performances from a technical perspective, he had the ability to imbue his readings with a deep sense of atmosphere. He gave full weight to the meditative aspects of the music that he conducted, a characteristic which gave even greater force to the more furious and energetic passages. At all times Chalabala was highly idiomatic, possessing an instinctive sense of style as well as drama.

These virtues may be clearly seen in his numerous recordings of opera, the most famous of which are those of Dvořak’s Rusalka and Smetana’s The Bartered Bride. He also recorded Foerster’s Eva, Smetana’s The Kiss and The Devil’s Wall, Dvořak’s The Devil and Kate and Fibich’s Šarka. Although he appeared only rarely in the concert hall Chalabala left outstanding recordings of four of Dvořak’s symphonic poems, and of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade, all of which illustrate to the full his extraordinary prowess as a conductor. He was clearly a musician of great imagination.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).