Dvorák’s songs usually turn up in German translation or as a slim group sandwiched among those of other composers in a wide-ranging recital program. So here’s an opportunity to get a cross-section of his mature song output in first-rate performances by the vocal world’s reigning Czech mezzo-soprano. The program opens with the Op. 73 set of four songs set to folk poetry and then moves to the eight little gems of the Op. 55 Gypsy Songs. Commissioned by a singer at the Vienna Court Opera, Dvorák set the latter to his own German translation of Czech poems, then revised the group to fit the Czech originals. I don’t hear much Gypsy influence, but these pieces do have the direct simplicity of lovely art songs evoking folkish values. Everyone’s familiar with the most popular of the set, “Songs my mother taught me”, sung by Pecková with an understated, fetching calmness. The eight Op. 83 Love Songs are rooted in Dvorák’s early Cypresses song cycle, to which he returned throughout his life, arranging many of them as wordless chamber music works and publishing revised song versions. Taken together, the songs form a “love diary” exploring the different emotions triggered by unrequited love. They average about two minutes apiece but Dvorák packs a world of intensity into them. Pecková resists the temptation to go over the top, even when the text speaks of the heart as “a barren wilderness/Where there is room at most/For pain and woefulness.”
The disc closes with the 10 Biblical Songs Op. 99, a product of Dvorák’s American sojourn and drenched with longing for his homeland even as he adapted what he considered “typical” American music. Texts are drawn from the Psalms and the music is suffused with an intensity light-years away from the lighter folk-based works. Pecková is quite wonderful here, capturing the mood of hushed intensity and displaying her warm middle register and smooth top. Irwin Gage’s sensitive accompaniments are a big plus; time and again he turns a keyboard phrase in a way that captures your admiration. Sonics are good too, well balanced between voice and piano. Dvorák’s songs, like everything the man wrote, are brimming with attractive melodies, so it’s only the relative obscurity of the texts’ Czech language that keeps this part of his oeuvre from being as popular as it should be. So why doesn’t this get a 10/10? Because the booklet layout is a disaster, with the Czech texts and their English, French, and German translations placed consecutively instead of side-by-side. So if you get this disc–and you should–be prepared for lots of page-flipping if you’re not fluent in Czech.
