Much of Josef Suk’s piano music has an elegiac quality and assumes the nature of a personal confession. These characteristics are particularly evident in some of the best works here: Summer Moods, Things Lived and Dreamt, and the heartbreaking About Mother, in which Suk describes his deceased young wife in music to their surviving son. As you probably already know, the woman in question was Dvorák’s daughter, and the loss of both her and Dvorák himself within the period of a few months gave birth to the anguished Asrael Symphony. So Suk’s music generally has a very high degree of romantic subjectivity, and the fact that his piano works are more intimate and smaller in scale than his massive tone poems makes them excellent introductions to his art.
Certainly Pavel Stepán does an excellent job in evoking atmosphere and catching the underlying rhythms that propel the music’s lyrical flights. All of these pieces are collections of vignettes, as popularized by Schumann in his great piano cycles, and one thing Stepán manages especially well is characterizing neighboring movements so as to create variety, even when their mood is consistently wistful or somber. There is no competing complete set currently available, nor does there need to be. Recorded in 1974-75, the sound is perfectly acceptable by today’s standards. If you missed this set the first time around, here’s your chance to make amends. This is a very serious body of work, more than three hours of it, and it’s well worth getting to know. [4/4/2006]
