Vitězslav NOVÁK (1870-1949)
Piano Concerto in E minor (1895) [27:00]
At Dusk, Op.13 (1896) [10:19]
Toman and the Wood Nymph, Op.40 (1906-07) [25:02]
Jan Bartoš (piano)
Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra/Jakub Hrůša
rec. 2019/20, Studio 1, Czech Radio, Prague
SUPRAPHON SU4284-2 [62:36]
When it was first announced that Supraphon was recording Novák’s Piano Concerto, the coupling was intended to be Schumann’s Concerto, a piece of programming that probably caused disquiet. Why, after all, Schumann? A possible idea might have been to conjoin it with the concerto by Novák’s teacher, Dvořák, but Supraphon had already recorded that with Ivo Kahánek in Bamberg a couple of years earlier with the same conductor as this latest disc, Jakub Hrůša. Another idea might have been to add the concerto by Novák’s slightly older contemporary Karel Kovařovic, which would certainly have stimulated enthusiasm. But in the end the A & R team in Prague has had second thoughts regarding the Schumann and seven months after the Novák was taped they added Toman and the Wood Nymph and asked pianist Jan Bartoš to record the solo piano piece At Dusk. An all-Novák programme, even with a solo piano piece, certainly looks better than the awkward addition of the Schumann.
This isn’t the first recording of the Concerto, an honour that fell to that great servant of Czech music, and a Novák specialist – he was a composition student of the composer - František Rauch whose LP with Josef Hrnčíř conducting the Radio Prague Symphony is hard to find but has helpfully been uploaded to YouTube. It, by the way, conforms to the timing in the Novák thematic catalogue of 28 minutes. Bartoš is a minute quicker, a pretty negligible difference.
The strange thing about the concerto, which was written in 1895 when the composer was 25 and about to finish his music studies, is that he never performed the work (he was a pianist), grew increasingly to disparage it, and only consented to a premiere in 1915. Even then he didn’t perform it, leaving the solo role to his sister-in-law.
It’s quite possibly the first Czech piano concerto in which the three movements are coalesced, however obviously, into one along Lisztian lines. Sensibly, since the fault lines are so blindingly clear, Supraphon has separately tracked the three sections. There is indeed a fluid Lisztian quality to the writing, with a full complement of turbulence and its opposite, a kind of decorative tracery. The orchestration is attractive with fine opportunities for the wind principals as well as serious-sounding paragraphs for the stentorian brass. Novák’s solution to the three-in-one nature of the structure is to move from the opening to the central section via a kind of diaphanous dissolve at which point the piano’s lyricism is paramount. There is much ripe sentiment and great beauty, and the orchestration here is appropriately light. The same veiled tone leads onto the finale, a kind of Furiant but one without much obvious folkloric vitality. Nevertheless, there is energy, albeit of a less distinctive kind, until the grandiloquence of the final bars in which Novák pulls out the stops. He clearly harboured doubts about the work, as noted. Perhaps they might have focused on a lack of balance between the soloistic part and the orchestral, the repeat of the ‘fade’ into and out of the central panel – once is good, twice is predictable – and a slightly underwhelming finale but it’s excellent to hear this youthful work in a CD performance as well prepared and executed as this and to make up our own minds about this long-neglected piece.
At Dusk is a concise four-movement solo piano work written the year after the concerto. This is another work the label has recorded before when Martin Vojtíšek played it on an all-Novák piano disc (SU 3575-2 131). Both he and Bartoš have their own way with it. Vojtíšek prefers a greater sense of verticality, speed and rubato in the opening Andante – you can even hear the pedaling in his recording – whilst Bartoš is more inward in the following Alla ballata, his charming and dappled sense of the music contrasting fruitfully with Vojtíšek’s more robust approach. In the last of the four movements it’s the older player who stresses the Andante instruction of Andante grazioso whilst Bartoš, the younger, prefers the grazioso.
Toman and the Wood Nymph is just the kind of legend – the story concerns the power of the faerie world on St John’s Eve – that Dvořák loved to set. Novak was a mature composer of 37 when he completed this symphonic poem for large orchestra and the confident handling is everywhere evident. There are assimilated Debussian elements as the work starts and some Straussian ones later but he expertly delineates the restlessness and danger inherent in the music as well as its moments of languor and ardour. Hrůša moves from episode to episode very perceptively – you can separately track these as Chandos did for Libor Pešek and his BBC Philharmonic forces on CHAN 9821 but Supraphon refrains from doing this. I think the Prague Radio team draws out the woodland respite with just tangibly more relish than the BBC Philharmonic but there’s little in it. However, Pešek sculpts detail rather more rigorously and heavily than Hrůša and some may well prefer the greater subtlety of the Prague performance, as I do.
Studio 1 of Czech Radio has quite a spread to its acoustic and this is most noticeable in the Concerto, the first piece to be taped, but the piano is caught with clarity. That said, if we are comparing recorded sound I prefer that for Hrůša’s Dvořák-Martinů disc in Bamberg.
There a fine trilingual booklet note (Czech, English and German) from Vlasta Reitterová and an interesting note from Hrůša in which he writes of his long acquaintance with Novák’s music but situates it, admiringly but dispassionately, outside the Big Five of Smetana, Dvořák, Janáček, Martinů and Suk.
Jonathan Woolf
