Novák’s staunchest
champion in his music for the piano
was František Rauch. True, in more recent
years Martin Vojtíšek has garnered
a share of the kudos for his recordings,
of which I’d especially recommend the
Sonata Eroica on Supraphon SU3575-2
131 and the earlier disc for Panton,
which included Mládí
(Panton 81 9007-2 131). It should be
noted that Vojtíšek plays the
last-named complete and that in his
Supraphon traversal of 1969 Rauch played
selections - substantial ones certainly,
but still not complete. In a sense though
these are in many ways complementary
sets because Vojtíšek gives us
the pleasurable Barcarolles Op.10,
At Dusk Op.13, the Op. Serenades
and other most valuable repertoire.
Rauch’s set lays no claims to completeness
but its claims on the admiration of
the listener are pretty well unstinting.
He recorded this body of work over a
seven-year period and served his one
time composition teacher in Prague,
Novák, with the highest dedication.
It’s valuable to have
the lightly didactic Sonatinas on one
disc. The 1971 Supraphon sound is rather
shallow but that won’t dim the pleasure
you’ll derive from them. There’s a Schubertian
lyricism in microcosm in the First,
a feeling only intensified by the descriptive
titles that would so appeal to the young
- The Nightingale Darted Skyward
and Rejoices, for instances, which
grabs the eye and mind rather more intensely
than the more prosaic Allegro molto
moderato (though Toscanini would doubtless
disagree). The liquidity and legato
of the same Sonatina’s middle movement,
with its embedded cuckoo greetings,
is equally charming and the delightful
left hand pointing of the finale (Merry
Company) is full of chattering and shade.
Schumannesque descriptiveness courses
through the Second with a full workout
in its finale for the right hand, whilst
the Elysian central panel of the Third
has its own limpid delicacy. The Fourth
features a dramatically shaking Dragon
- and if you want to know where Vaclav
Trojan, himself from Plzen as was Rauch,
developed his baroque-dancery turn to
the same sonata’s Finale. Novák
taught Trojan in Prague, as he did the
young Rauch, and it’s tempting to see
in Trojan’s music for Prince Bayaya
a fond reminiscence of Rescue by
Prince Charming from this Sonatina.
Crepuscular glints haunt the central
movement of the delicious Fifth, nature
painting at its most affectionate and
undemanding, and hymnal richness concludes
the Sixth, the only two-movement Sonatina
of the set. These aren’t intellectual
works nor are They part of his pantheistic
or even Moravian-Slovakian musical agendas.
But they’re delightful.
The Sonata Eroica
was his big two-movement work (though
in three distinct and conventional sections)
of 1900. Alternately powerful and ruminative
it reveals Novák’s complete command
of pianistic rhetoric, even when it
becomes quite knotty and thorny, as
it does in the central paragraphs despite
the suitably heroic and triumphant first
movement ending. The combined slow movement
and finale use rhythms solidly based
in the folkloric soil with an increasing
lyric infusion of exultation. Rauch
plays it with utter concentration and
commitment. The bigger work on the second
disc is Pan, a nearly hour long
five-movement tone poem. It’s probably
better know in orchestral guise and
Jílek’s recording of it has garnered
some praise – though it’s very seldom
performed in concert because it’s so
difficult to programme. Nature writing
and the quest for human love are the
twin motors of Pan and the prelapsarian
days of 1910, the last few years of
Austro-Hungarian hegemony, were probably
the perfect moment for this fluorescence
of longing and rapture. From the pan-piping
treble of the Prologue, with its luscious
stepped and terraced chords, we feel
the full weight of his Virgilian inspiration.
Passionate amplitude (wonderfully contained
by the Supraphon engineers) drives The
Mountains and the third movement, The
Sea, glitters and ripples almost as
much as Iberia. Rauch digs in with evenness
and depthful drama. He’s perhaps at
his greatest in The Forest where the
swirling mysteries and impressionistic
obscurities gradually give way to refined
calm and increasing ease. Dramatic and
also coquettish Novak’s The Woman
is by far the longest of the five movements.
For Novák Woman was the Eternal,
and his almost painterly obsession,
Schiele-like in its driving and nervous
intensity (though not perhaps in its
ambiguity), was a constant feature.
Romantic yet uneasy, questing yet uncertain
this movement is riven with his own
uncertainties, infatuations, dualities
and fears. Insistent and finally burnished
with romantic glow it’s also a projected
self-portrait of infinite suggestiveness;
far more naked and revealing than perhaps
the composer himself knew.
It’s some way from
the urgent desires of Pan to
the Bagatelles. Here we find
in the First the influence of Brahms
even more than Dvořák
and a capricious dance in the fourth
and last that shows that the creator
of the Sonata Eroica could unbend just
as charmingly as his teacher Dvořák
or Smetana. My May is
another of his nature-drenched creations,
a ten-minute hymnal to the beauties
of field, meadow and Slovakian dance,
the Bohemian-born Novák being
one of the staunchest admirers of the
Slovak lands. Full of suggestive nature
calls and scurrying woodland life there’s
a dash of Schumann and Grieg here as
well. Songs on Winter Nights,
written during 1902-03, does show further
influences, primarily that of Debussy
though the tempestuous second movement
does show how harmonically advanced
was Novák’s thinking by this
stage. The Third Song, Christmas
Night, is spare, with bell peals
and the final one is the most virtuosic
with the composer indulging his more
extrovert Lisztian instincts to usher
in Carnival Night. Youth (Mládí)
consists, in this selection, of twelve
little pieces, which Rauch plays with
great affection. Longing (No.6)
has a certain noble antique romance
feel (a tie in with that almost contemporaneous
Sonatina) whilst No.8 is a delicate
lullaby, and there are some contrastive
dances later on and a naughty Devil’s
Polka to conclude matters. This set
has much in common with the Sonatinas,
from the nostalgia, the descriptive
simplicities and the child-like visions
to the nature loving and Novák’s
concentrated pictorialism.
This is clearly a benchmark
set for collectors. The recorded sound
varied over the period but it’s never
less than good. The notes are in Czech,
German and English and cannily quote
from the composer’s reminiscences. Add
Vojtíšek and you’ll have a powerful
collection of the piano music in your
library.
Jonathan Woolf
see also review
by Rob Barnett
František Rauch (piano) 
