SACDs - Janacek

This album offers two of the best known and most loved works by Leoš Janáček. The Glagolitic Mass was thus described by a musicologist: "It has absolutely everything, it’s engrossing and enthralling and captivating and startling and soothing and primitive and pristine and incredibly spiritual".

Taras Bulba is a Rhapsody for Orchestra. The work combines diffuse, almost easy-listening romanticism with enough mystery and tangy dissonance to tell you immediately who the composer is. The orchestra, choir and conductor on this album are familiar from many other PentaTone Recordings such as the Wagner Edition and the Brahms Requiem (PTC5186361).

An original programme of post-Smetana chamber music placing Janacek amongst his contemporary competitors. Naturalism (Fibich), spiritual fidelity to the ethic of Dvořák (Foerster) and uncompromising patriotism (Novák) form a sharp contrast to the storyteller, composer of the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ Quartet, forgetting the law of counterpoint, as in Pohádka whose centennial Praga commemorate here, in the original four- movement version.

Both Janacek’s string quartets, alongside works by Schoenberg, Berg and Zemlinsky, form the pinnacles of modern chamber music in the inter-war period.

Janáček composed the quartets in 1923 and 1928 respectively and gave them revealing sobriquets. ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ for the first quartet refers to a novella by Leo Tolstoy in which the emotional power of music is held responsible for a matrimonial drama. If this quartet was secretly addressed to Kamila Stösslová, the object of Janáček’s adoration in his later life, then the sobriquet of the second quartet, ‘Intimate Letters’, refers rather openly to the same addressee. The composer reinforced this amorous subtext by using an instrument which has love in its name: “The whole thing will be held together by a special instrument”, Janáček wrote, “it is called viola d’amour – viola of love.” Janáček was fascinated by the silvery sound of the richly decorated instrument in the viola register. For practical reasons he had to dispense with the viola d’amore and adapt the work for an ordinary viola but for this recording, Gunter Teuffel and the Mandelring Quartet have reconstructed the original setting, offering Janáček’s second string quartet in both versions, for viola as well as viola d’amore.

Janacek left only a few piano masterpieces, their language forming a sort of dreamlike counterpoint to his fantastic operatic repertoire. Slavka Pechocova’s playing reflects the rigour of her first teacher, Martin Hrsel, and the almost-Impressionistic expressiveness of her second, Professor Ivan Moravec, in a new, highly spirited, recording of Janacek’s Piano pieces which should be acclaimed as one of the most promising of the year so far. She made her Proms debut at the Proms last year with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Jirí Belohlávek in Martinu’s Concerto for 2 Pianos.