LOS ANGELES — Avant-garde Czech composer Miroslav Srnka has said that he hopes his music will make his audience “feel uncomfortable.” Superorganisms, his super-sized work that received its U.S. premiere by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Walt Disney Concert Hall on Oct. 9, does have uncomfortable and perplexing moments. But its predominant features are meditative calm, mathematical complexity, and a tingling serenity — not discomfort.
Susanna Mälkki, a frequent and welcome guest on the Disney Hall podium, brought a precise and delicate sensitivity to Srnka’s sprawling 18-minute opus, composed in 2022 and commissioned by a consortium of orchestras including the LA Phil and the NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, which gave the world premiere in 2023. Other performances followed at the Berlin Philharmonic, under David Robertson, and the Orchestre de Paris, led by another Finn, Klaus Mäkelä.
Along with this premiere, whose extreme density must have tested the patience of conductor and orchestra in rehearsal, the concert included two other nicely complementary works by composers from Eastern/Central Europe: the enchanting Oboe Concerto by fellow Czech Bohuslav Martinů and the familiar and always surprising Concerto for Orchestra by Hungarian Béla Bartók.
In recent years, Srnka, born in 1975 in a small city in what was then Communist Czechoslovakia, has created a succession of adventurous and provocative works that have established him as the leading Czech composer of his generation. His opera South Pole, an ambitious and costly “double opera” that tells the story of the competition between explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen to be the first to reach the South Pole, was mounted by the Bavarian State Opera in 2016 and put Srnka on the map as a composer to watch for originality and intellectual gravitas.
A recent broadcast from Radio Prague anointed Srnka as the rightful heir of the distinguished Czech musical tradition handed down by Antonín Dvořák, Leoš Janáček, and Martinů. Although Srnka today is much better known abroad than in Czechia, he calls this national musical heritage “my mother’s milk. I cannot get rid of it even if I wanted to. And it reminds me that we are all part of something much bigger than ourselves.”
In Superorganisms, Srnka, who admits to being a “mathematically thinking person,” explores that relationship between the individual and the collective in communities dependent upon cooperation. The orchestra is a prime example. Like bees and ants, the players can only function as members of a larger entity. They represent what Srnka calls the “multiplication of the positive power of individuals.”
“Each orchestra member has an independent role: there are literally thousands of tiny points, lines and pillars of sound,” he explains. “The strings are sometimes treated almost as soloists but come into their own only as a group.” The first of the four parts of the piece contains a sequence of 1,351 four-part chords that blend and separate and come back together in a biological process unique to superorganisms. The result is what he describes aptly as a “carpet of sound.”
In weaving this carpet, Srnka relies for unusual sonic combinations upon an enlarged and quirky percussion section that includes vibraphone, marimba, crotales, roto-toms, two accordions, piano, two harps and waldteufel — a friction drum whose pitch and volume are controlled by the touch of a finger on a taut skin. Four each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, trumpets, and trombones plus six horns join a large string section to create a remarkable and rarely encountered palette of orchestral color, variety, and depth.
The scale and ingenuity of Superorganisms makes it practical only for the kind of very large and contemporary space that Disney Hall affords. Srnka has noted elsewhere how the kind of halls in which we hear music — their style and age — has a crucial influence on how we receive what we are hearing. In a more traditional hall such as Boston’s Symphony Hall, the impact would be very different.
Opening with a low rumbling in part one that rises to a fragile tinkling in the percussion, the four parts proceed in vast waves of sound. Srnka favors a low volume level, at times reaching toward silence, as in the second part, where accordions provide a steady underpinning that sounds almost like purring. Various instruments come forward, especially the flutes, and then retreat into the background. In the third section, similar to a scherzo movement, the piano and flute engage in a conversation in descending and ascending scales.
The dense orchestral texture of the fourth section recalls the opening of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, with its similar confusion and articulation of many different lines. Repeated horn calls lead us to the very quiet ending on the border of audibility. Mälkki led the orchestra through this extremely challenging score with an impressive confidence and clarity. Distinguishing the hundreds of chords in Srnka’s lofty scheme was not an easy task. What the piece achieved was a hypnotic calm and a masterful display of the infinite possibilities of orchestral sound.
Srnka was present for the performance and came out to acknowledge the warm, if not effusive, ovation of the considerably less than capacity crowd. Whether Superorganisms will enjoy an extended life in the concert hall is an open question, given the vast resources it requires.
Most of the orchestral army retreated from the stage for Martinů’s Oboe Concerto, scored for a chamber-sized ensemble that provided a refreshing contrast in scale and its sunny personality. Composed in 1955, when Martinů (1890-1959) had returned to Europe after a long period of living in the United States, this attractive and accessible concerto was written for the Czech-born Australian oboist Jiří Tancibudek and had its premiere in 1956 in Sydney with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt.
The soloist for the LA Phil performances was Ryan Roberts, appointed as the orchestra’s principal oboe in 2025. A splendid and artistically acute performer, he played from memory, switching moods easily in a piece that (like so much of Martinů’s music) proceeds in a protean parade of styles that range from Baroque gestures to folksy harmonic shifts reminiscent of the pastoral world of Janáček. At the piano, Joanne Pearce Martin made the most of numerous duets with the soloist.
Bartok’s 1943 Concerto for Orchestra, written in a less “difficult” style than many of his earlier compositions, received from Mälkki and the LA Phil one of the most spirited and nuanced performances of this masterpiece that I have encountered.
Powerful and full of passionate emotion, the concerto unfolds in five sections, with a tragic elegy at the center. Its inventive variety offers intricate fugato passages in the first movement, a series of duets for various instruments in the second, a parody of the main theme from Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony in the fourth. In the final movement, Mälkki built the fury and energy of Hungarian dances and their tricky rhythms to a thrilling climax that penetrated to the music’s temperamental core.
