What’s a party without a little Czechs Mix?

On the next “Music from Marlboro,” for your Wednesday cocktail hour, we’ll snack on two masterworks by Antonin Dvořák and Leoš Janáček.

Dvořák’s unpretentious “Serenade for Winds” was given its premiere in 1878. The composer was 37 years-old. The serenade is written in the tried-and-true “Slavonic style” that established Dvořák’s fame. Its instrumentation and emphasis on melody recall occasional and ceremonial serenades of the 18th century.

We’ll hear a recording made in 1957, with oboists Alfred Genovese and Earl Shuster, clarinetists Harold Wright and Richard Lesser, bassoonists Anthony Cecchia and Roland Small, hornists Myron Bloom, Richard Mackey, and Christopher Earnest, cellists Yuan Tung and Dorothy Reichenberger, and double bassist Raymond Benner, all under the direction of Louis Moyse.

Janáček String Quartet No. 2 is a serenade of a different sort. The composer’s remarkably prolific Indian summer can be attributed in part to the sublimated passion he felt for Kamila Stösslová, a married woman some 38 years his junior. The quartet, composed in 1928, when the composer was about 74 years-old, was inspired by their long and intimate – though unconsummated – relationship, detailed in their more than 700 letters. The work has been described as a “manifesto on love.”

We’ll hear Janáček’s “Intimate Letters” performed at the 2002 Marlboro Music Festival by violinists Nicholas Kendall and Hiroko Yajima, violist Richard O’Neill, and cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach.

You bring the drinks; I’ll supply the music – on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page