Janacek: On An Overgrown Path (Po zarostlem chodnicku)

Leoš Janacek composed numerous works for piano throughout his career, but they are mostly minor – dances, folksong arrangements, album leaves, occasional pieces. The three shining exceptions, brought together on this CD and all composed in the period 1900-1912, constitute his chief claim to significance and originality as a composer for the keyboard.

The tragic occasion commemorated in Janacek's only piano sonata grew out of the movement to establish a second Czech-speaking university in Moravia. The Czech proponents of the university organized a mass meetings and street clashes took place. The police and army were ordered to clear away the Czech demonstrators, and during the fighting a 20-year-old apprentice joiner, František Pavlik, died from the effects of a bayonet wound.

Janacek was horrified by this event, and poured his reaction into a work for piano, which he initially entitled From the Street 1 October 1905. For all their varied tempi and flickering changes of mood, the pieces that make up Book Janacek's piano cycle On an Overgrown Path, are concerned with memory and sorrow, for the cycle was associated in the composer's mind with the death of his beloved daughter Olga in 1903. Five of the pieces had already been in existence for a few years before that event and had originally been intended for harmonium. The 'overgrown path' of the cycle's overall title is obviously symbolic of memory, the passage of time, of absence.

The suite In the Mists was probably composed in early 1912; it was certainly provisionally complete by 21 April, when Janacek sent a copy to Jan Branberger, hoping it would be reviewed; later in the year he also entered it in a competition. Much shorter than On an Overgrown Path, In the Mists has something of the character of a private journal, with halting, delicate phrases tracing the twists and turns of inward, private emotions. According to Janáèek's biographer Jaroslav Vogel, the four pieces were prompted by the composer's feelings of professional insecurity and his feelings following the deaths of both his children, which he described as 'one long struggle between resignation and newly-felt pain'. While the suite presents few technical challenges to the pianist, it demands sensitive and spontaneous execution.

A comparatively tiny body of music – fitting on one CD – Janácˇek’s piano music may lie less easily under the fingers than (to cite a contemporary miniaturist) that of Anton Webern, but it’s affecting and intriguing out of all proportion to its size, from the violent Sonata inspired by a brutally quelled demonstration of social unrest, through the elliptical tone-poem In the Mists, to the almost diary-like intimacy of From an Overgrown Path. Composed against the backdrop of failed ambitions and arduous work on his operas, these piano works offered refuge to Janácˇek. But rather than turning inward, the composer found huge potential within their intimacy. Proto-dramatic, these pieces explode with enthusiasm.

Who better, then, to convey the quirky poetry of this music’s sudden outbursts than someone who learnt it at the feet of the composer himself. When the seven-year-old Rudolf Firkušný took lessons from the great man in 1919, Janácˇek had already composed all the music here and was embarking on the remarkable Indian summer of operatically centred creative activity that, launched with the long-delayed premiere of Jenu°fa, came to confirm him as one of the last century’s most instinctively gifted composers for the stage. Firkušný became a far more adept pianist than Janácˇek ever managed, and in a lifetime of performing this music – the present issue represents his last recorded thoughts – came ever deeper to convey the hidden emotions of From an Overgrown Path’s titles such as ‘Our evenings’, ‘They chattered like swallows’, and ‘The barn-owl has not flown away’.

Ivana Gavrić made her debut on Champs Hill Records in 2010, when her playing described as “altogether of an extraordinary calibre” by BBC Music Magazine who also made her Newcomer of the Year in their 2011 BBC Music Magazine Awards.

Her second recording brings together works written between 1905 and 1912, by composers separated by nationality; but linked together in possibly the most exciting period in modern European culture.

Completing her survey of Janáčekʼs major solo piano works, Ivana puts On an overgrown path and the Sonata, 1. X. 1905 in the context of Ravelʼs Valses nobles et sentimentales and Prokofievʼs Sonata No. 2.

Ivana writes “Ever since my student years, the Ballets Russes have greatly fascinated me, in particular Prokofievʼs involvement with Diaghilev and the company. His second Sonata is a real statement by a young composer who has just formulated his style, full of his trademark soaring melodies and occasional sarcastic gestures.”

At a similar time and as if in another world, Janáček was finding his unique style at his own pace. He uses Moravian folk melodies first in the opening numbers of the Path, and more confidently in the Sonata. His harmonies and textures develop, becoming far more daring and introverted in the later-composed and more obscure numbers of the Path. Like Prokofiev, melody was key for Janáček, although in a more fractured, febrile state.

“ I have always been drawn to the brash, brass-like chords at the start of Ravelʼs Valses nobles et sentimentales” adds Ivana. “They open the work with such a rude gesture, later melting into more sensuous and quirky takes on the waltz which end in an epilogue: a hazy recollection of ʻthe night beforeʼ.”

This CD is the Début Recording for the Zurich Oboe Quartet

Using the instruments of the oboe family, the musicians of the Zurich Oboe Quartet have created a perfect harmony of sound, bringing back to life a facet of chamber music closely tied with the renaissance of the tenor oboe.

Antonin Dvorák’s “American Quartet” and Leos Janácek’s “On Overgrown Paths” are adaptations made by the Quartet. Juraj Filas’ “Dear good old freedom” was composed for the Quartet and was premiered in Basle on September 3, 2000.

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.