‘I will be standing up for Novák from now on,” writes conductor Jakub Hrůša. “Novák is worth knowing about, and we must play his music.” This is Vítězslav Novák (1870-1949), who was a pupil of Dvořák in Prague, and one of the young composers, alongside Suk and Janáček, who joined a group of artists and writers to publish a “Czech manifesto of modernism” in 1895.
Yet beginning this disc with Novák’s Piano Concerto, which he completed in 1895 and planned to introduce the following year to mark the end of his piano studies, does not do him many favours. Novák himself quickly took against the piece, later calling it a “monstrosity”, and did not allow it to be performed for almost 20 years. Certainly there’s not much sense of individuality about what is a generic late-Romantic piano concerto, indebted to Liszt and Tchaikovsky, as well as, inevitably, to Dvořák, and which is crammed with hefty bravura solo writing that is dispatched on the recording by Jan Bartoš with suitable muscularity.
Bartoš’s expressive gifts are better displayed in At Dusk, a set of four piano miniatures from the same year as the concerto, but it’s the work that ends the disc, the symphonic poem Toman and the Wood Nymph, that justifies Hrůša’s enthusiasm. Completed in 1907 and based on an early 19th-century ballad about a youth who is seduced by a wood nymph on St John’s Eve, it was the third of Novák’s symphonic poems, and shows the mix of early modernist styles that he had grafted on to a form he’d inherited from Dvořák. There are hints of French impressionism, but most of all there’s the imprint of Richard Strauss, whose Salome Novák had just encountered. It’s an effective piece, full of striking, pictorial invention, and Hrůša and the Prague Radio orchestra project it with every bit of the vividness it needs.
This week’s other pick
Simon Rattle’s second recording of Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen (LSO Live) comes from semi-staged performances directed by Peter Sellars that he conducted with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, London, in June last year. His first version, released by EMI in 1990, was sung in English, but this one uses the original Czech text, with a multi-national cast led by Lucy Crowe as the Vixen and Gerald Finley as the Forester. It’s a warm, wonderfully detailed performance, superbly sung by all involved, in which Rattle’s admiration for Janáček’s score shines through; Cunning Little Vixen was the piece, he’s said, that made him want to conduct opera, and that affection certainly comes across.
