Janacek: In the Mists (V mlhách, Im Nebel)

Eric Schneider has studied both the piano and conducting. He pursued a career as an accompanist and has worked with world renowned singers such as Christine Schäfer and Matthias Goerne. This is his first solo recording.

Since his first release for Virgin Classics, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations in 2000, Polish pianist Piotr Anderszewski’s has produced a catalogue which ranges from Bach and Mozart, through more Beethoven to Chopin, Szymanowski and Webern, and which includes several prizewinning recordings.

Both intellectual and inspirational, Anderszewski has said of musical interpretation: “One can speculate endlessly about the right ingredients, the perfect combination but the essential question remains unanswerable, lying far beyond the limits of the cleverest and most refined argument. And yet one goes on searching and, while realising that the search is about everything, the essence may yet reveal itself in the most unexpected way.”

This new release captures live performances by Anderszewski at a very recent recital – December 2008 – in New York’s legendary Carnegie Hall. The critic of the New York Times made clear that this was an exceptional musical experience.

After a performance so intense and draining, the notion of encores almost seemed superfluous. But Bartók’s Three Hungarian Folksongs from the Csik District had a welcome earthiness”

Anderszewski repeated the programme in Chicago shortly afterwards, and the response of the Chicago Sun Times was at a similar level of enthusiasm:

“There is something deeply comforting about the kind of perfection that Polish-Hungarian pianist Piotr Anderszewski brought to his program of Bach, Janácek and Beethoven … Perfection is a relative term when it comes to art, of course. There are myriad but equally valid ways to play a Bach partita or Beethoven sonata … Different artists plumb different facets in a piece of music, and listeners can only benefit from hearing what each one has managed to unearth.

But during the two hours or so that they are onstage, artists like Anderszewski manage to create a universe that seems utterly complete unto itself. There is a sense of inevitability in their performance, a feeling that the true essence of a composer's intentions has been discovered. Especially when our daily lives are battered by forces beyond our control, it is reassuring to spend an afternoon in a world of such richly calibrated balance.“

“It can be hard not to wax hyperbolic when confronted with the pianist Piotr Anderszewski’s sensitive touch and potent imagination.” New York Times

Piano virtuoso, Rolf Hind, performs repertoire which draws its inspiration from the country and countryside, bucolic revelry and folkloric nostalgia. Composers include Grainger, Finnissy, MacMillan, Janacek and Bartok.

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.

After important contributions to the album ‘Romancendres’, pairing the music of Clara Schumann and Heinz Holliger, and an acclaimed recording with Carolin Widmann of Schumann’s Violin Sonatas, here is the first ECM New Series solo disc from Hungarian pianist Dénes Várjon. It’s an unusual repertoire for a recorded recital – of three masterworks of piano literature by Berg, Janáček and Liszt.

The recital draws the listener in from the first moments – beginning with the dark, brooding language of Alban’s Berg’s Piano Sonata Op. 1, shaped in the shadow of Schoenberg, and continuing into the nebulous regions of Janáček’s impressionistic and near-contemporaneous In The Mists, finally emerging into the clear light of Liszt’s immense - and immensely-influential - B minor Sonata. In fact both Berg and Janáček were inspired by Liszt.

As Dénes Várjon says, “It is always highly interesting to find connections between composers, and bridges between epochs in musical history. In the mirror of other composers and periods, I begin to see new dimensions of works which I have performed, and this is especially the case when I play pieces by Ferenc Liszt. Even more strongly, I see him as a main figure of the current of music history. There are certain works by him I need to play and explore again and again - most importantly, his B minor Sonata. For all its rich texture, its great structure and its length, there is not one single note which is not a most important part of the whole.”

Dénes Várjon studied at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest with, amongst others, composer György Kurtág. He is a regular guest at festivals including Edinburgh, Salzburg, Lucerne, Schleswig-Holstein, Venice, and the Marlboro Festival (USA). He is invited annually to András Schiff’s and Heinz Holliger’s Ittinger Konzerttage. He has performed with major orchestras such as The Camerata Salzburg, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Wiener Kammerorchester, Camerata Bern, Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra, the RSO Berlin, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Gidon Kremer’s Kremerata Baltica, and many others.

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’.