Most music festivals expand as they mature, with additional concerts and more ambitious programming taken as a mark of success. The five concerts that comprise this year's Bohuslav Martinů Days, a program too brief even to qualify as a "festival," would seem to be just the opposite. But in fact the event, now in its 12th year, has been a tremendous success at accomplishing its main goal: popularizing the music of one of the most-overlooked composers of the 20th century.

"When we started, it was unusual to find Martinů on concert programs, even in the Czech Republic," says Bohuslav Martinů Institute Director Aleš Březina. "Now, it's very common. Our primary goal has been fulfilled."

This has allowed the institute to direct its resources elsewhere — in particular, to fund a definitive critical edition of Martinů's work, the first volume of which is due out next year. That volume alone will cost the institute an estimated 1 million Kč ($46,100), and further Martinů's work and reputation worldwide far more effectively than a single concert series in Prague could.

As always, the series opens with performances by the prizewinners in the annual Martinů Foundation Competition, this year for violin players. Eleven contestants are registered, and the best of them will be invited to play at Lichtenštenjský palác Dec. 3. The competition retains its national flavor — only Czechs, Slovaks and foreigners living in either country are allowed to enter. But discussions have begun about broadening it to an international roster, perhaps as soon as 2009.

A chamber music concert at the Rudolfinum's Suk Hall Dec. 5 pays homage to the friendship between Martinů and the late Pierre Fournier, one of the finest French cello players of the 20th century. The idea for the concert grew out of a conversation between Březina and Fournier's son Jean Fonda, a noted pianist. Březina suggested doing a concert in honor of the 100th anniversary of the senior Fournier, who was born in 1906. "If you do that, and get me a good cellist," Jean Fonda replied, "I'll come to Prague and play for free."

Březina secured the services of a very good cellist: Tomáš Jamník, a winner of both Martinů Foundation and Prague Spring competitions. He and Fournier will reprise a celebrated recording that Fournier made with his father, of sonatas reaching back to Beethoven and ending with Martinů's Sonata No. 1 for Cello and Piano, which the composer dedicated to Fournier Sr.

The Czech Philharmonic caps the series with two evenings of Zdeněk Mácal conducting Brahms' Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra, featuring Prague favorite Garrick Ohlsson at the keyboard, and a pair of Martinů works culminating with his Symphony No. 1. That symphony has been a favorite of Mácal's ever since the first time he conducted it 40 years ago, and Martinů's widow, Charlotte, told him afterward how much her husband would have loved the performance.