I recently discovered Janáček's In the Mists, one of the most hauntingly beguiling pieces I've heard since Chopin's first nocturne, coming at you in creeping, lyrical waves. Several YouTubers chose to upload it accompanied with Impressionist art (e.g. this or this version), with good reason. I think this really needs to find room in the usual Mozart-Chopin-Vivaldi diet fed to classical music newbies. Janáček's music has a lovely, fragmented enigma about it which I wish more people knew and loved.
Tangential Google searches led me to the poetry of Czech Nobel Laureate Jaroslav Seifert, including these lines, which nicely complement the above video's piece and painting:
The mists are dancing, wearing wreaths
of daisies, bird droppings, and rust
their swirling cloaks
still red from the extinguished evening sky.
(From Lovers, those evening pilgrims . . ., translated by Ewald Osers)
Seifert's overall style is characterised by a fervent, searingly frank narrative voice. Take lines such as:
'Once only did I see
the sun so blood-red.
And never again.
It sank ominously towards the horizon
and it seemed as if
someone had kicked apart the gates of hell. '
(from Once only... (ibid))
or this, which is satisfying in or out of context. Breathless well describes his voice:
'That has been my destiny.
And I’ve been staggering towards it breathlessly all my life. '
(from To Be a Poet (ibid)).
He's also capable of a nice tenderness:
'Lovers, those evening pilgrims,
walk from darkness into darkness
to an empty bench
and wake the birds.'
(From Lovers, those evening pilgrims . . ., (ibid))
It's overall satisfyingly colourful and energetic stuff. Highly recommend.
I wandered on from Seifert to the Czech language's most famous poem, Maj (May) by Karel Hynek Mácha. You can read it in Dr James Naughton's fine translation here. It does not take the poet's painstaking note (at the bottom of the page) for us to understand that the plot (a lovers' tragedy) merely serves to embellish the natural beauties of the seasons. I read somewhere that these opening lines are known to all Czech schoolchildren:
It was late eve - the first in May -
Eve in May - it was love’s hour.
Love's hour it might be, but we do not encounter a lovestruck character until the 38th line; the opening 37 linger vividly, unhurriedly, on 'quiet moss,' 'the bright suns of other worlds,' 'twilight's lap.' All emphatically speak of, or evoke, love (the 'turtle-dove's voice' calls to it, the stars resemble 'wandering lovers'), but the rich description clearly exists for its own sake, and not for the sorrows of the 'fair maid' we are at last introduced to, weeping for her lover's execution. She herself is lavishly described in terms of the natural world; 'beauties flit' through her cheeks [l]ike amaranth in springtime sear'; her sobbing 'mingle[s]/With the waters' mysterious moaning'; her tears die 'like falling stars.' When a boatman she mistakes for her lover approaches over the horizon, Mácha delays the revelation over twenty lines, ostensibly to crank up the tension, but really just to indulge in more lyricism, with the boat's sail blossoming slowly from a 'water-lily' to a 'stork' in flight, while the oar:
'[..] shapes about itself long furrows,
Whose brows the skies’ golden roses
Burning by the oak groves on the hills
Edge with hue of rosy gold.'
In four lines, to describe a minute detail, we've just slalomed with breathtaking speed and precision around the entire landscape.
I'll leave you to read the rest. It's one of the most carefully lyrical works I've read in a while, and wonderfully patient in its unfurling.
The 5th, Deutsche Grammophon informed me, marked the birthday of not just one but three piano legends- Pollini, Brendel and Michelangeli. It's a nice day to be reminded of Brendel and Michelangeli in particular, whom I haven't listened to in a while, but who to me exemplify some of the very best of 20th-century pianism.
Here's to Michelangeli's intense aristocracy, and Brendel's dignified transparency.
I've got two standout recordings for Michelangeli. One is his take on Chopin's Berceuse, a piece in the hands of many pianists hushed and intimate (and that's no bad thing), but which under Michelangeli's fingers glows with the kind of unsentimental refinement Chopin himself probably played it with, with the emphasis very much on broad-stroke colours. It's a school of Chopin playing we're fast losing, and I'm glad we still have these treasures from the previous century.
It's always nice to hear Debussy being played by someone who emphasises the structure of the music, rather than treating it as improvisatory yarns. Michelangeli's Debussy is gorgeous this way, dignified and restrained.
If you haven't heard Nyíregyházi play the slow movement of Rachmaninov's second piano concerto, it's really something you can't miss. Nyíregyházi's signature snail's tempo and raw lyricism, as usual, truly own the piece; it's the most compellingly unusual take on a hackneyed piece I've heard since Rachmaninov's own performance of Chopin's second nocturne.
Update: I glanced again at the video and realised, to my astonishment, that this was an arrangement for solo piano. Clearly, Nyíregyházi was sonorously captivating enough that I hadn't even missed the orchestra in earlier listens.
And then there's his performance of Liszt's Evening Bells, from the Christmas Tree Suite Liszt wrote for his granddaughter. Again, Nyíregyházi elevates what's just a pretty delicacy in most performances into a sonorous, beautifully voiced meditation.
Talking of 'pretty delicacy,' I was thinking of a comment YouTuber Ashish Xiangyi Kumar once made about Nyíregyházi- 'We need more pianists like him around nowadays, when everyone's so obsessed with musical prettiness as an end in itself (rather than as a tool to be strategically deployed for specific effects).' That's probably one of the most valuable insights into performance I've heard in a while. Sounding good isn't just about sounding aurally agreeable; it can, and often should, be, about the opposite- pushing the listener out of their comfort zone. If you ask me to name great recordings off the top of my head, my answers are usually a roll-call of weirdness and outright brutality, and usually unmistakably signed by the performer's spirit (Friedman's mazurka recordings, Michelangeli's Preludes and so on). Just to test the point, I sat down at the piano today to play the slow movement of Chopin's first concerto, a traditionally elegant and romantic piece, and mucked around as brutally as I could, yo-yoing the tempo, disobeying indicated articulation, reinventing the phrasing. The distortions were incredibly satisfying, but not as satisfying as what happened when I attacked the Op 9 no 2, a nocturne I've come to slightly dislike for its fussiness. I played it as a parody of itself, exaggerating the rubato here and there, and dashing away the ornaments at a contemptuously breakneck speed. I think ripping apart conventionally pretty pieces is something every pianist should try in their own time, just for the heck of it. It's quite liberating.
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