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Stories   >   Leif Ove Andsnes tackles Dvorak's charming miniatures with gleaming luminosity / FINANCIAL TIMES

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Leif Ove Andsnes tackles Dvorak's charming miniatures with gleaming luminosity / FINANCIAL TIMES

Posted: October 28, 2022

'I have to say I think this is the great forgotten cycle of the 19th century piano music. Maybe those are big words, but I do feel that,’ states Pianist Leif Ove Andsnes about his latest release on Sony Classical. On this album, he presents the most substantial piano collection by the great Romantic composer Antonín Dvorák - the unjustly neglected Poetic Tone Pictures.

According to the Norwegian pianist, these undiscovered gems show an entirely different side to the composer known for his symphonies and string quartets. ‘I love this music and no-one seems to play it,’ says Andsnes, who also championed the rarely played piano works of Jean Sibelius with the release «Sibelius» in 2017. 

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.  

FINANCIAL TIMES - Richard Fairman writes…The best part of two years without concerts kept musicians at home and gave them time to explore beyond their usual musical boundaries. Pianists, in particular, benefited and the rewards are coming through in the form of new recordings.

For the Norwegian Leif Ove Andsnes, the discovery was Dvorák’s most substantial piano work, the Poetic Tone Pictures. This collection of character pieces, composed over seven weeks in 1889, has had a few recordings in the past, but it does not often turn up in the repertoire of an international pianist from outside the Czech tradition.

Andsnes calls this “the great forgotten cycle of 19th-century piano music”, which is going too far, but it does consistently present imaginative music and is well worth getting to know. At around five minutes each, the 13 vignettes are perfectly shaped and add up to more than the sum of their parts.


Dvorák himself cited Schumann’s collections of shorter piano pieces as an example and that is very much what we have here, albeit with a distinctly Czech accent. Song-like lyricism and dance numbers with Czech roots predominate.

Andsnes sets the tone straightaway with a gleaming luminosity of piano sound in the opening “Twilight Way”. The “Spring Song” and “Serenade” are melodic gems of a kind Dvorák seemed able to create swiftly and easily and without limit. Among the dance-based pieces, the wild yet playful “Furiant” and spooky “Bacchanalia” stand out. Andsnes is persuasive throughout and his championship of these charming miniatures has yielded dividends.

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