Leif Ove Andsnes tackles Dvořák’s charming miniatures in Poetic Tone Pictures — album review

The best part of two years without concerts kept musicians at home and gave them time to explore beyond their usual musical boundaries. Pianists, in particular, benefited and the rewards are coming through in the form of new recordings.

For the Norwegian Leif Ove Andsnes, the discovery was Dvořák’s most substantial piano work, the Poetic Tone Pictures. This collection of character pieces, composed over seven weeks in 1889, has had a few recordings in the past, but it does not often turn up in the repertoire of an international pianist from outside the Czech tradition.

Andsnes calls this “the great forgotten cycle of 19th-century piano music”, which is going too far, but it does consistently present imaginative music and is well worth getting to know. At around five minutes each, the 13 vignettes are perfectly shaped and add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Dvořák himself cited Schumann’s collections of shorter piano pieces as an example and that is very much what we have here, albeit with a distinctly Czech accent. Song-like lyricism and dance numbers with Czech roots predominate.

Andsnes sets the tone straightaway with a gleaming luminosity of piano sound in the opening “Twilight Way”. The “Spring Song” and “Serenade” are melodic gems of a kind Dvořák seemed able to create swiftly and easily and without limit. Among the dance-based pieces, the wild yet playful “Furiant” and spooky “Bacchanalia” stand out. Andsnes is persuasive throughout and his championship of these charming miniatures has yielded dividends.

★★★★☆

‘Dvořák: Poetic Tone Pictures’ is released by Sony Classical