The piano music of Leoš Janácek does not play itself. Janácek approached the instrument not so much as a virtuoso vehicle than as a tool to express his idiosyncratic, speech-like musical thoughts. And what thoughts! You have the diverse and unpredictable short pieces making up the On An Overgrown Path suites, the alternately brooding and restless drama of the Sonate 1.X.1905, plus the graceful and declamatory four-movement suite In The Mist. András Schiff’s performance of the Sonate marked the high point of his 1999 Lucerne Festival recital, which I was fortunate enough to attend. It whetted my appetite for the present release. Put simply, Schiff’s Janácek cycle (his first solo project for ECM) has proven to be the most accomplished, idiomatic, and lovingly detailed since Rudolf Firkusny’s DG and RCA traversals of the composer’s complete piano music.
Comparing Schiff’s 1992 Decca recording of On An Overgrown Path Book One to his ECM remakes, I find the new versions consistently riper in nuance, more flexible in rhythm, more sharply accented (try the central movements four through seven), and benefiting from ECM’s more resplendent engineering. The other works boast no less detail and passion from Schiff’s fingers, especially in the Sonata’s multi-leveled articulation and dynamic scaling in the first movement. Here Schiff’s pronounced differentiation between legato and staccato creates a textural richness that even surpasses Firkusny’s mastery. In short, Schiff’s Janácek now ascends to the head of the class among reference versions. Long may it reign! [10/22/2001]
