Leopold Godowsky is a legend among pianists and piano aficionados. His fiendishly difficult 53 Studies on Chopin Etudes has created a sort of magic, almost frightening aura around his creative personality–so much as to hide a whole side of his output, like the beautiful impressionistic Java Suite (mid-1920s), here recorded complete for the first time. Godowsky’s cycle includes 12 short, highly suggestive tone-poems: the opening Gamelan gives the tone of the whole collection, followed by such deliciously evocative pieces as Puppet Shadow Play, Chattering Monkeys at the Sacred Lake of Wendit, Boro Budur in Moonlight, The Gardens of Buitenzorg, Streets of Old Batavia, In the Kraton, etc. The music combines Debussy’s liquid harmonies with a more conventional sense of form. But Godowsky’s hyper-refined, multi-colored, densely textured writing goes far beyond mere picturesque evocation, conveying an intensely poetic feeling of exuberance, nostalgia, and mystery.
The young Indonesian pianist Esther Budiardjo gives the Java Suite instant classic status. Her accurate, insightful and radiant performance brings out the best of each piece. Perfect dynamic and tonal control allows her to create haunting atmospheres, revealing the hypnotic beauty of masterpieces like Gamelan or Boro Budur in Moonlight. Three more Indonesia-inspired pieces by the Polish-French composer Alexandre Tansman make an idiomatic coupling to Godowsky’s Javanese musical excursions. The Bamboo Flute in the Forest of Bandoeng is a stunning aphoristic pearl, played by Budiardjo with a supreme sense of articulation and strangeness.
Considering all these seductions, we can but wonder why the two ongoing complete cycles of Godowsky’s piano music–Scherbakov’s on Marco Polo and Grante’s on Music & Arts–started with the hard-to-digest Bach transcriptions and other less interesting pieces instead of the extremely appealing Java Suite. Contrary to what’s written on the cover of this newcomer, at least four selections from the Java Suite have previously been recorded aside from The Gardens of Buitenzorg, including numbers 1, 4, and 9 by David Saperton on Vai Audio, and Wayang-Purwa (by Marc-André Hamelin on a CBC Records/Musica Viva CD that also includes the famous Gardens). Gardens also is available on at least two more recordings–by the composer himself on APR, and by Stephen Hough on Virgin. Anyway, the present complete recording, wonderfully played and in state-of-the art sound on a magnificent instrument, fills in a major gap of Godowsky’s discography.
