On An Overgrown Path,
Piano Sonata (From The Street 1. X. 1905),
In The Mists
Thomas Ades Piano
Signum Classics SIGCD 600
Full Price
The Review
When composers play or conduct they seldom get sentimental. They rely on the quality of the music to make the emotional points rather than trying to drag every breath of pathos out of the phrasing. Ades approaches Janacek with just that balance between affection and respect. These pieces, the best of the Moravian’s piano music, come across as beautifully articulated essays, serious reflections on some harrowing events that at the same time need no narrative to stand as introspective masterpieces. There is plenty of drama, no showmanship or virtuosity for its own sake.
Ades’s performances are masterly. The fourteen pieces that make up the two volumes of On An Overgrown Path occupy the bulk of the disc. Ades finds a wonderful balance between crisp incisiveness and lyrical thoughtfulness. He does wander along the path but always with a confident sense of direction. Janacek used these pieces to reminisce, often painfully as his childhood is contrasted with the tragedies and disappointments of adulthood, but he was first of all a professional composer who loved to find an over-arching shape while, like Schumann, giving each element its own personality.
Where Ades scores over so many interpretors is that he does not feel it necessary to overlay Janacek’s music with nationalistic rhetoric or indulgent romanticism. He is gentle and fierce as needs be but lays out each movement to be inspected without artifice. This is illustrated beautifully in his handling of the desperately poignant seventh piece of the first set which Ades plays with delicacy but perfect clarity. It is music first, biography a distant second.
From The Street 1. X. 1905 is a work of overt political protest, a banner raised against the killing by Empire troops of a demonstrator calling for a Czech language university in Brno on that date and first performed three months later. For some reason Janacek turned against the piece, destroying the manuscript, only relenting twenty years later. It is inevitably a more public statement than On An Overgrown Path but it occupies the same pianistic territory and is treated by Ades with great care.
About In The Mists, he says the greatness, ‘lies in its very claustrophobia and austerity of means’, though its four short movements come over as more conventional, less programmatic and introverted than Janacek’s other piano music. It still has the same contrasting elements of bare simplicity and rapid ferocity but it is more abstract.
Ades is perhaps the most complete composer–conductor-pianist alive just now and, were British hype merchants as raucous as American ones, would surely find himself compared to Leonard Bernstein. Whereas Bernstein pulled every piece of music apart and put it back together with ‘remodelled by Bernstein’ stamped on each page, Ades is content to let Janacek make his case without interference. He is helped by an utterly superb recording, made in London’s Henry Wood Hall. This is a disc that should be prized as one of the great piano recitals – and one of the finest examinations by one first rank composer of another’s – for many generations to come.