Interview, Bartók, Janáček and Szymanowski from Piotr Anderszewski

Hot on the heels of last Friday's Recording of the Week, a look at a very different side (or, perhaps, not so different?) of Janáček comes from pianist Piotr Anderszewski, whose latest album - released in January - combines Book II of On an Overgrown Path with works by Bartók and Szymanowski. All these works see their composers draw in various ways on the folk music and influences of their native countries and regions - Moravia, south Poland and Hungary. 

I caught up with Piotr to talk about this music, and what it means to him - distant memories of childhood, shelved recording projects revived after many years, and the ever-present spectre of the tawerna!

Image credit: Ari Rossman. Cat: unknown.

What first led you to put together this programme focusing on early 20th-century Central European piano repertoire?

It actually started with the Janáček, which I recorded quite a long time ago. I fell in love with the music and after having played it for a few months I really felt that I had it 'in me' and I found it a shame not to leave a record of that.

This was almost ten years ago now - I was then recording another CD in Warsaw and I just suggested to my team 'why don't we spend a few hours on recording some Janáček?' So that's what we did, without any further plans about the broader project. So it was there, sleeping in a sense, for all these years.

And that's the same recording that's on the album, older than the other pieces?

Yes - it's much older. And then the next part of the story is the Bartók Bagatelles - this is a work that I used to play a lot, but it was over twenty years ago. Every few years I would say to myself 'This is such a powerful cycle, I want to go back to it!' and every time I would postpone it for some reason.

In 2022 I had a sabbatical, and I had lots of ideas about what to learn - what should I confront myself with? And I came across the Szymanowski Mazurkas, which I'd played a little in the past but not that much. This time I completely fell in love with them, and I decided to go for it - at least five or six of them, to start with. Then, came a moment in which I thought 'well, the Janáček is there already, the Bartók is sort of still in my system even after quite a long time; let's put this all together on a CD.' So although perhaps this isn't a wise thing to say in public, I did not decide to record this whole project right from the start! It just happened over years. Generally I’m not the type of musician who sits down and decides to systematically record, say, the Beethoven 32 sonatas over the next ten years - I'm not like this. Things happen - I don't believe it's by accident, but they just happen when the right time comes.

Is there a personal connection for you with this kind of music?

Very much so - the Szymanowski Mazurkas probably least so, although I am very familiar with his music. The difference, in my view, is that in these Mazurkas, Szymanowski isn't quite writing in accordance with his true nature. He is such an aristocrat, so much of a refined aesthete, and in the Mazurkas he's doing something a bit against it.

So it used to somehow bother me, but now I love it; you know, I am finding an almost subversive pleasure in it! The idea that he's doing something which is not in his nature - and yet he does it with such originality, so much his own wonderful way.

Different from his orchestral music, or even different from the rest of his piano music?

I mean different from this piano music I have mostly played so far. He turned to this folk-music quite late in his life, not like Bartók who was on that path almost from the beginning. Szymanowski tried many other things first - his first period is very much under the influence of post-Romanticism, of Richard Strauss, with big orchestral works like for example the Second Symphony. Then he turns into something much more personal around the First World War, with some of what I think are his greatest masterpieces - he then really found his own language, created his own fantastic universe, all of it permeated with intense eroticism. And then later, in the '20s he turned towards Polish folk music, and the Mazurkas are maybe the most radical in that sense.

You’re playing a selection from those Mazurkas, which are in a set of 20; why did you choose these six from that set?

I did a little bit of research about how he wrote them; they weren't conceived as a whole. The first four, I think, are more or less written in order, but not the rest. He took bits of a tune here, a bit of a motif here... and then put them all together with no chronology, as if he wasn't even sure which bit would end up in which Mazurka. So I don't think there's much sense playing them all in order unless you really want to. And to be very honest, I just picked the ones I liked the most! And I tried to make an order out of them that made sense.

Do you treat things like the Janáček Overgrown Path and the Bartók Bagatelles as having a bit of a through-line going through the set when you play them – maybe even a kind of narrative – or in your mind are they more standalone miniatures?

The Bartók, absolutely. I would never dare play just a few Bagatelles in a concert, or change the order - absolutely not. The Janáček? Well, the first book of the Overgrown Path, yes. But the second book - part of it wasn't published during his life, there are some disagreements about the order. For instance in some editions No. 3 and No. 5 are swapped. It's not that clear - so the second book I would not say has a clear sense of cycle.

But Bartók? For sure. There's a sense of crescendo, especially towards the last pieces - they become longer, more complex, more dramatic. There's definitely something going deeper, broader and more expressive - until the sardonic waltz at the end.

You’ve focused on Szymanowski before – with that highly acclaimed recording from 2006, for instance. Is he someone whose music you’re interested in pursuing further, maybe even to the point of a complete ‘works of’ project?

Well... this might change in the future, but I haven't been such a fan of his early works - like the Preludes or Variations, all the music he wrote before the First World War strongly influenced by post-Romanticism and in which I feel he did not find his language yet. So for that reason I don't think so. I would like to do more of the Mazurkas, though.

How direct is the link to the Central European tradition in this music - can you hear clear traces in the melodies?

It depends. With the Bartók Bagatelles it varies; they are very experimental pieces. Some of them, for sure, use a folk motif here and there, other less so. But there are two of them - Nos. 4 and 5, where he even puts the words of the music on the score! One in Hungarian and one in Slovak. One of them says something like “While I fell asleep my cow has gone!” Rather wonderful! In any case, it’s a recognisable tune that he harmonises and arranges. There's no doubt.

In Janáček's case, we know he travelled all over Moravia collecting tunes - very extensively. I personally don't know these tunes, so I couldn't identify specific uses of them in the Overgrown Path. But there are moments where he uses them, I'm sure.

With Szymanowski, we know that he moved to Zakopane, in the south of Poland, near the Tatra Mountains - and he was definitely in touch with the local, very specific kind of folk music, which is different from the rest of Poland. Again, I can't recall specific melodies that I would personally identify. He probably immediately transformed them - I think he was much less of a purist in that sense, than Bartók. As I mentioned, he probably took bits and pieces and put them together in his music even if originally they didn't belong together.

You grew up in Warsaw yourself - did you come across some of this kind of folk music in some form?

Well, it's more complicated than that - I grew up in both Warsaw and Budapest, because my mother is Hungarian. I wouldn't say it was a big factor. I certainly wasn't in the habit of travelling out into the country, following folk bands and looking for these things. But I do remember as a child, on the radio, hearing folk ensembles. I wouldn't listen actively to seek this music out, but among my childhood memories are things like eating breakfast in the kitchen and those tunes, those rhythms from Southern Poland coming from the radio, regularly!

So presumably those relatively vague memories aren't something you'd be drawing on very much in this sort of piano music either?

It's very hard to say - especially in childhood, when you experience and absorb so many things. Some things you remember, others you don't remember consciously, but they do stay in you often without you knowing it consciously. So yes, I do believe that growing up hearing this music, even just hearing it randomly like at breakfast on the radio, has an effect. There was a fashion at that time for 'folk ensembles', both on the radio and the television, and with the Communists in power there was this whole idea that the music of the folk, of the people, was the real thing. And maybe there were some good sides to that idea, in the end. Some of those ensembles, I must say, were not very 'pure' in their style - sometimes arrangements with symphony orchestra so it certainly wasn't very authentic - but it was there and as a child I was exposed to those melodies and rhythms, for sure.

And then it might come out subconsciously in your playing?

Yes, for sure. With Szymanowski and with Bartók, at least; with Janáček I can't say.

I've always felt a very deep and special connection with Janáček though, ever since I first came into contact with his music. There's something quintessentially Slavic in his music - the spirit of the Slavic soul speaks through it, I can't put it into words any other way. This is what I meant in the sleeve notes to the album when I say there's no 'stylisation'. It's primal, sometimes it’s almost a scream. It has not much to do with pieces like for example the Hungarian Dances by Brahms, or Hungarian Rhapsodies by Liszt; a bit of rusticity here or there but more as a decoration, all remaining within the frame of solid Germanic music.

The three composers on my last CD have very little to do with this. They really go to the core of the local folklore, to the raw emotions it conveys. The melancholy, the despair, sometimes the wild joy!

Would you say that these composers are actually trying to translate the specific sounds and expressive effects of folk instruments to the piano?

I would say that the answer is broadly no, but that the piano is a really magical instrument which has a diabolical power to suggest. It can suggest the human voice, the orchestra, a cimbalom.

So it's more up to the interpreter to suggest for example something like 'this is a guy singing in a tavern, he's had several glasses of vodka and is very much out of tune'. Or 'this is a solitary “goral” (mountain folk of southern Poland) sitting on the mountain slope in a naive reverie.'

It's really up to the pianist to imagine, to suggest and to awake the imagination of the listener.