Dvořák: Poetic Tone Pictures, Op. 85

Antonín Dvořák’s Poetic Tone Pictures is a piano cycle that, for many years, has been little-known and rarely performed, despite its composer’s evergreen popularity. And that’s a shame because this substantial work of 13 pieces is replete with the folkloric magic that could often inspire Dvořák to his best efforts. For the performer, the collection is highly demanding, at times requiring serious virtuosity; and the sense of narrative, with its kaleidoscopic range of colour and emotion, pulls the listener headlong into a magical world. Pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is convinced the pieces deserve a much wider audience. “My father had an LP of it at home when I was little, with the pianist Radoslav Kvapil, so I listened to at least the first few pieces when I was a child,” Andsnes tells Apple Music. “I was very much attracted by them and played one in a youth competition when I was 12. Later, in my twenties, I played five or six of them in a recital programme. It has the same attraction for me today. It’s like opening a book and feeling something very personal as you enter this special room.” At first, he hesitated to tackle the complete set. “Then the pandemic arrived and, suddenly, we all had a little more time to think and reflect. I decided to play through most of Dvořák’s piano music, just to see what was there. When I came to this cycle, I realised how wonderful it really is. “Some of them feel like short novels, while others are pictures of everyday life. I think of them as many individual stories, but with some interconnections. For instance, the opening chords of the first piece are repeated at the end of the sixth.” Ultimately, beyond the images suggested by the titles, he considers the music sufficient on its own. “I’m not somebody who necessarily has stories in my mind about these pieces and what they might represent. The amount of special musical material, much of it so personal and intimate, is what I find easy to believe in. “The challenge is to display its diverse and contrasting journey with all the highs and lows, from the religious aspect of the final piece, ‘On the Holy Mountain’, to the gossiping in ‘Tittle-Tattle’; from the joke in ‘Toying’ to the atmosphere of ‘In the Old Castle’. Switching between high and low is something I find so interesting in general. It is also part of a Schumann-esque world and even part of late Beethoven with a combination of folk dances and spiritual elements.” The stand-out pieces are many and varied. “‘Serenade’, I think, is central. I just love it! It shows so much of his particular talent: how he can take something that could have been banal—a serenade idea with a guitar figuration and a simple melody—and turn it into this extremely special slow siciliano, which has something almost holy about it, a feeling of true love. ‘Bacchanalia’, the 10th piece, is wild and virtuosic, climactic in that way, as is ‘At a Hero’s Grave’, the penultimate piece. Then there is a very special ending in ‘On the Holy Mountain’.” Andsnes has always had a special fondness for Czech music: “I had a Czech teacher, Jiri Hlinka, whom I met when I was 15 and who really meant a lot to me,” he says. “My love for Janáček came from him. At one of our first lessons, when I arrived, he was sitting there playing the first piece from On an Overgrown Path. I hadn’t heard of Janáček before, and he was a bit shocked! It was so appealing to me that I started playing all those pieces, and one of my first recordings was of Janáček.” Dvořák, unlike Janáček, has sometimes been mildly dismissed as a composer for the piano. On the one hand, Andsnes thinks the reputation of the Piano Concerto as difficult and unpianistic could be partly to blame; on the other hand, he suggests that Dvořák sometimes suffers when compared to Brahms. “They were friends and admired each other, but because Dvořák’s music doesn’t have the same sort of counterpoint, friction and textures, he seems a little lighter. But I think he has tremendous gifts in how he can develop very simple material into real jewels, often in surprising ways. I think that’s very much true in these pieces, in which writing ‘programme music’ maybe freed his imagination. “When I started studying the set,” Andsnes adds, “I knew the first pieces and enjoyed all of them, but I was less sure about the second half. Now I see that, actually, it is a very well-conceived cycle: those contrasting last pieces make so much sense.” And it is large, too: “We’re talking 55 minutes,” Andsnes says. For listeners exploring its enchanted journey, though, it might just be a case of the longer, the better.