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Stories   >   Leif Ove Andsnes, winding and weaving an intricate pattern for each of the 13 'Dvorak - Poetic Tone Pictures' / VAN

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Leif Ove Andsnes, winding and weaving an intricate pattern for each of the 13 'Dvorak - Poetic Tone Pictures' / VAN

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.


VAN'S Olivia Giovetti writes….When you think about it, it’s a wonder that Dvorák didn’t emerge as a hero of the pandemic. Perhaps we’re too conditioned to think of him as the composer of the “Slavonic Dances” or that one opera that has demonstrated you can have a Black woman play the Little Mermaid and the world won’t implode. But the composer’s larger body of work, with its balance of visceral introspection and vast natural landscapes, was ideally suited to lockdown. He was, as Jakub Hruša points out, driven by both spiritual belief and a love of nature. And whose lockdown didn’t vacillate between those points at least a little bit?

As his career progressed and his finances found even footing, Dvorák made good on one dream: buying a country house roughly 40 miles southwest of Prague, where he felt “cut off from the world” and able to “enjoy the beauties of God’s nature.” It was there, in self-imposed isolation, that he wrote his “Poetic Tone Pictures”: a series of 13 piano miniatures, each one a meditation on their title that goes beyond narrative. “Here I am a poet as well as a musician,” Dvorák said of the work to his friend, the music critic (and fellow train enthusiast) Emanuel Chvála. Each portrait is imbued with a hue of ardent lyricism and consideration. “Sorrowful Reverie” is a pain-is-pleasure kind of sorrow; the kind that Goethe or Rimbaud would happily wallow in while stretched across a divan and watching rain pelt the window. Each miniature also works in conversation with the others; as “Reverie” moves into “Furiant,” it feels like one fluid movement—a moment of languid heartbreak turning into blind rage.

“Clearly he was thinking of them as a cycle,” Leif Ove Andsnes says in the liner notes to his new recording of the “Poetic Tone Pictures.” It’s an album we can thank lockdown for: With his concert schedule wiped clean in 2020, Andsnes (who had played some of the pictures as standalone works throughout his career) took the opportunity to settle down with the full score. Dvorák’s own trial-and-error approach to composition, especially when it came to the piano—an instrument he didn’t own until his 40s—offers several pandemics’ worth of time for exploration and development in his solo works for the instrument. The fact that there are so few complete recordings of the “Poetic Tone Pictures” also means there is plenty to glean from the score.

It’s fresh snow that Andsnes deftly trods, winding and weaving his footsteps into an intricate pattern that arranges each of the 13 pictures to foster that sense of conversation and engagement. Andsnes’s technical command of a score has never been a matter for debate. It’s one of the reasons that he’s able to prolifically release albums (which, since the beginning of the pandemic, have included a Grieg recital with Lise Davidsen, two installments of a multi-volume Mozart odyssey with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and guest spots on both an all-star Bent Sørensen collection and a tribute to the Norwegian composer ??Ketil Hvoslef). But I doubt he would have reached the same levels of depth and connection had he been able to record this Dvorák without the enforced slowdown of 2020. Here, the interiorities converge.

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