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Stories   >   Leif Ove Andsnes - Dvorak: Poetic Tone Pictures. Brilliant, skittish, fairytale gems brought to light / The Guardian

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Leif Ove Andsnes - Dvorak: Poetic Tone Pictures. Brilliant, skittish, fairytale gems brought to light / The Guardian

Posted: November 17, 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.  
 

From The Guardian

Dvorák’s collection of miniatures is surprisingly little known. This enchanting new recording reveals a composer fascinated by the small complexities of the world around him

Erica Jeal writes… "I love this music and no-one seems to play it.” It’s only a slight exaggeration on Leif Ove Andsnes’s part to say that about Dvorák’s Poetic Tone Pictures; this beautifully recorded release is one of only a handful available, and he is the highest profile of today’s pianists to have recorded this baker’s dozen of miniatures.

You’ll wonder why on earth they have flown under the radar for so long. Evocatively titled individually and often sounding deceptively simple, they come from a similar impulse to that of Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Grieg’s Lyric Pieces or even Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. It’s not certain whether Dvorák wrote them to be performed together as a collection or not, but they work well this way, not because they tell an extended story but because each fits into the sonic context of what comes before.

There’s a once-upon-a-time, scene-setting feel to the opening piece, Twilight Way, its skittish middle section anticipating the lighter restlessness of the next one, Toying. Then comes one of the highlights of the set, In the Old Castle, in which Dvorák constantly keeps the key and our perception shifting: is this place benign or sinister?

Later on there’s a vigorous Furiant – Dvorák’s love of Czech folk-dance rhythms is never far away – and a perky Dance for some unusually sweet-sounding Goblins, who take a rather languorous rest in the middle. There’s a fairytale atmosphere to many of the pieces, but that’s not to say they are simple: Andsnes works hard to make them sound effortless, not least in the crazily fast detail of the 10th piece, Bacchanalia, brilliantly dispatched. These are not cosy children’s pieces: Dvorák’s harmonies and melodies never do quite what one expects, and nothing is purely whimsical. Instead, as with Schumann and Grieg, there’s the sense that one is listening to a composer who is delightfully fascinated by the small complexities of the world around.

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