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Stories   >   Leif Ove Andsnes chats with North Eastern Florida's WFSU Public Media about Dvorak's 'Poetic Tone Pictures'

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Leif Ove Andsnes chats with North Eastern Florida's WFSU Public Media about Dvorak's 'Poetic Tone Pictures'

Posted: January 17, 2023

With his commanding technique and searching interpretations, Leif Ove Andsnes has won worldwide acclaim, performing in the world’s leading concert halls and with its foremost orchestras. An avid chamber musician, he is also the founding director of Norway’s Rosendal Chamber Music Festival.

Following the success of the “Beethoven Journey” collaboration, Andsnes and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra partner for their second multi-year project titled “Mozart Momentum 1785/86” which sees them explore one of the most creative and seminal periods of the composer’s career. In Spring 2021 Sony Classical releases the first of two volumes in the project, featuring Mozart’s piano concertos Nos. 20, 21 and 22 and chamber music written in the same year.

Leif Ove Andsnes records exclusively for Sony Classical. His previous discography comprises more than 30 discs for EMI Classics – solo, chamber, and concerto releases, many of them bestsellers – spanning repertoire from the time of Bach to the present day. He has been nominated for eleven Grammys and awarded many international prizes, including six Gramophone Awards.  Recent releases encompass the Billboard best-selling Sibelius as well as Chopin: Ballades & Nocturnes (Sony Classical), an album of Stravinsky’s music for two pianos with Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion), Schumann’s Liederkreis & Kernerlieder, with Matthias Goerne (Harmonia Mundi), Bent Sørensen’s piano concerto, La Mattina, with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and Per Kristian Skalstad (Dacapo) and a disc dedicated to the music of Norwegian composer Ketil Hvoslef on which Andsnes performs the piano concerto written in 1994 with the Bergen Philharmonic and Edward Gardner (Simax).

Andsnes has received Norway’s distinguished honor, Commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav as well as the prestigious Peer Gynt Prize. He is also the recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Instrumentalist Award and the Gilmore Artist Award. He was inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame in 2013 and made an honorary doctorate of both New York’s Juilliard School of Music and the Bergen Conservatoire in 2016.

Leif Ove Andsnes was born in Karmøy, Norway in 1970, and studied at the Bergen Music Conservatory under the renowned Czech professor Jirí Hlinka. He has also received invaluable advice from the Belgian piano teacher Jacques de Tiège who, like Hlinka, has greatly influenced his style and philosophy of playing.  He is currently an Artistic Adviser for the Prof. Jirí Hlinka Piano Academy in Bergen where he gives annual masterclasses. Andsnes lives in Bergen with his family of three children.

The 13 postcards for piano that make up Dvorák’s Poetic Tone Pictures were written in the Spring of 1889, and signal a shift in style from a composer moving away from formal constructions towards a more free, inspired aesthetic. Among these charming pieces are evocations of magic and mystery (‘The Old Castle’), rustic dances (‘Furiant’ and ‘Peasant Ballad’), nostalgic mood pieces (‘Twilight Way’), and tragic reminiscences (‘At a Hero’s Grave’). The works range from the deeply profound to the playful, from lighthearted to furious - ‘I feel a very strong, wonderful narrative in them,’ says Leif Ove Andsnes, who firmly believes Dvorák conceived the pieces of this ‘exceptional’ set as a cycle to be played together.

‘It’s a cycle of many stories but it also feels like one big story. I feel it’s like someone opening a book and saying, ‘Listen, I’m going to tell you something’. And then it just opens, piece by piece’, he further concludes. One of the world’s pre-eminent pianists, Andsnes was first inspired to play Czech music when a new teacher arrived at his conservatory in Bergen, Norway, from Prague.  His enormous fascination for Poetic Tone Pictures led eventually to him performing parts of the repertoire at a Youth Competition at the age of 12.

Years later, as the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, Andsnes used the downtime to delve deeper into the Poetic Tone Pictures and commune with their stories. He found works of unerring charm and copious instances of Dvorák unfolding an orchestral breadth of color from the piano - in addition to his wickedly exciting use of cross-rhythms and syncopations, in the manner of Czech folk dances.

‘I think he creates unique colours at the piano, and he uses the full range of the piano convincingly, even if he was not a pianist composer’ says Andsnes of Dvorák’s craftsmanship, which the pianist himself captures across a recording of spellbinding focus made at Olavshallen, Trondheim and produced by John Fraser.  

Leif Ove Andsnes recently spoke with No. Florida's WFSU Public Media about Dvorák’s Poetic Tone Pictures. Listen to the attached interview.