András Schiff LEOS JANÁCEK A Recollection

The third ECM New Series release by András Schiff is his long-awaited recital recording of the piano music of Leoš Janácek  (1854-1928). He has been playing this music, to spell-binding effect, for many years. The Budapest-born pianist has long been interested in parallels between Janácek and Béla Bartok, and by the way in which Janácek drew upon Moravian folk roots, much as Bartók drew upon Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak and Transylvanian music. Each of these composers contributed to the national culture of his homeland by making evident what was already there, as well as by channelling it for differentiated artistic purpose. "These are healthy roots," Schiff told German arts magazine Ibykus, "from which one can take sustenance, and build upon."

Robert Cowan, writing in the CD booklet for the present release, also emphasises the life-affirming qualities of Janácek's piano music: "No matter how many times you listen to these gems, the sum effect of emotional engagement, wonderment and love of life is as lasting as one’s admiration for the music’s miniaturist construction. They are truly ‘the world in a grain of sand’. Trawling the repertory for piano masterpieces from roughly the same period, only Bartók’s gnomic ‘ethno-narratives’ (Out of Doors, Bagatelles, selected pieces from Mikrokosmos, etc) can claim anything like equal musical status. Janácek’s piano music anticipates the compressed keyboard tone poetry of such feted modern masters as György Kurtág and Arvo Pärt. They are, for the most part, honest fragments of personal biography, utterly uncompromising and securely grounded in the land of their birth. There is nothing contrived about them, absolutely no empty striving for effect, and yet their force of utterance is formidable. They confirm the mastery of a creative force who was, by turns, afflicted or infatuated by life." And definitively Czech: "His was an unlikely voice to represent a cultural identity for Czechoslovakia", the BBC Music Magazine remarked recently, "but it was an unlikely nation. The accent of Janácek's music is peculiar, the distinctive sound is somewhere deep in the provinces of the provinces..." (ECM Records)