Tomáš Víšek
has recorded him before
but here we have a total delight – a whole
disc of Ježek’s piano music. Not only this
but the recital was recorded on the composer’s
own piano in the Ježek Memorial Blue Room
in Prague. A booklet photograph shows the
pianist in action in the well named Blue
Room in what I assume was a February session
– he’s wearing a particularly chunky jumper.
One
of the major influences on Ježek was Zez Confrey
as one can hear during the vivacious course
of the Czech’s greatest international hit,
Bugatti Step. This is the piece
that gives the disc its title and was written
for the female racing driver Eliška Junková,
who drove a Bugatti and became something of
a Czech heroine. Víšek plays it with
immense brio and Confrey-inspired pep. In
his own performance on MDG 613 1158-2 the
German pianist Steffen Schleiermacher sounds
positively Brucknerian heard alongside the
infectious brio of the Czech player.
But then Víšek is
a master of this repertoire and allied ones
too – I will be reviewing the jazz and dance
based miniatures by Hába and Schulhoff
and they all benefit from Víšek’s eloquence
and perception. Try the sap quotient of the
1929 Three Policemen Step with its
offbeat bite. Or the limpid moments in the
Isabel Valse and its allied dance band
cadences. True the Grande valse brillante
is rather generic and nor is the Etude
as harmonically elusive as similarly titled
works by Schulhoff. But the Petite Suite
is a real pleasure – five brief movements
each exemplifying a particular facet of the
composer’s capricious wit; Bach, French-crepuscular,
the Confrey-Billy Mayerl axis – though I’m
not sure how much Mayerl he would have heard
by 1928 – and so on.
The Rapsodie has rhythmic
invention as well as clearly Czech outlines
and is the single longest piece here. The
Bagatelles fuse a ragtime-polka, a
compact funeral march, a notturno and much
else in their brief stay. Steffen Schleiermacher
essays them in the disc already noted but
his playing lacks the idiomatic freshness
and fluency of Víšek’s.
The Ježek
piano does have rather a noisy action but
is well recorded. This pianist is making a
habit of composer-piano discs; I reviewed
him playing Suk’s Bösendorfer No.15421 on
Arco Diva UP 0025-2 131 and long may he continue.
Gratitude also to Šimon Matoušek, whose
discs are always questing and always exciting.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
STUDIO MATOUS MK 0055-2 131 [61:02]
