by Patrick Rucker

….One very significant clue to Novacek’s particular success is discernible in the first piece of the set, Chapelle de Guillaume Tell.

…As one listens to ‘Chapelle de Guillaume Tell’ played by Berman, Brendel or Ciccolini, the mind wanders and the rhetorical gesture, inaccurately rendered, sounds vapid. As Novacek delivers it, we understand, metaphorically speaking, precisely what Liszt is talking about, and exactly why he chose to begin his journey through the marvels of Switzerland in Tell’s chapel.

…Of course many more attributes combine to make Novacek’s Swiss Année so compellingly beautiful. His sense of pace is leisurely and alluring, making the crystal-clear waters of Lac de Wallendstadt, marked Andante placido, not only placid but a veritable balm for the agitated spirit.

…As if all this were not enough, Novacek crowns his Années with the Six Consolations in exquisitely lyrical performances of the utmost sincerity.

…Very highly recommended.

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International Record Review

by Patrick Rucker

Liszt: Suisse

Années de pèlerinage  Première année, S160, Suisse, Six Consolations, S172
Libor Novacek (piano)
Landor Records LAN290 (full price, 1 hour 19 minutes).

Website:  www.landorrecords.co.uk

Engineer: Tony Faulkner

Producer: Jeremy Hayes
Dates:      November 17th-19th, 2008

Comparisons:
Années de pèlerinage:
Berman (DG) 471 447-2 (1977, three discs)
Brendel (Philips) 462 312-2 (1986, two discs)
Ciccolini (EMI Classics) 3 67906-2 (1982, five discs)
Grimwood (SFZ Music) SFZM0208 (2008, two discs, rev. Mar 2009)
Despite the general familiarity of Années de pèlerinage, it is encountered on recordings and at recitals most frequently in excerpts. In more than 50 years of going to concerts, I’ve heard the first two books ‘Switzerland’ and ‘Italy’ played as a cycle only once, by that intrepid Lisztian Alfred Brendel at a Carnegie Hall recital in the late 1970s. The entire cycle (three books, plus Venezia e Napoli, a supplement to the second volume), has been recorded rarely enough, with the sets of Lazar Berman and Aldo Ciccolini probably best known. Interestingly, neither Brendel nor Bolet assayed the craggy peaks of the third Année in the recording studio. Liszt’s Years of Pilgrimage, brimful with inspired and beautifully realized music, still represents relatively untrammelled territory for artists possessing that special blend of imagination, poetic temperament, emotional range, subtlety, rhetorical eloquence and, of course, supreme technical mastery.

The Prague-born, British-trained pianist Libor Novacek possesses all these qualities in abundance. The warm critical response that greeted his traversal of the second Année: Italie in 2006 (reviewed in January 2007) makes this new release the object of some anticipation. One very significant clue to Novacek’s particular success is discernible in the first piece of the set, Chapelle de Guillaume Tell. Liszt plunges into the piece, simultaneously raising the curtain on the entire set, with a chordal proclamation, Lento, in common time rhythmically notated: quarter rest, quarter, double-dotted quarter, bar line, whole note. This ‘motto’ or kernel from which the entire piece evolves is bound with a legato ligature in both hands. The rhythmic formula is then repeated, except that the legato ligature extends only to the sixteenth, which is then followed by a double bar, and a new legato ligature begins with the long ‘arrival’ chord. Novacek plays this figure exactly as Liszt wrote it, scrupulously observing the phrase shape, and lifting both hands and pedal at the rest. Surely this is not so remarkable!

In fact it is. Lazar Berman plays the same bars, with his characteristically sumptuous tone, without ever lifting the pedal once. Brendel’s voicing of the chords is more sensitive than Berman’s, but he also fails to lift the pedal during the rest. (Perhaps this is one of those instances that Brendel writes about in other contexts, where the pianist gives his audience a ‘visual cue’, by change of demeanour or posture. If so, it’s not surprising that such a visual cue doesn’t translate to a sound recording.) Finally, Aldo Ciccolini does observe the rests surrounding the opening motto but then, inexplicably, drives calmly through the motto’s second iteration, ignoring ligature break and double bar. No room here to expatiate here on fashion trends in music-making. Ciccolini, born in 1925, Berman in 1930 and Brendel in 1931 are of that generation of musicians who came to prominence in the years following the Second World War. With rare exceptions string players and conductors as well as pianists; only the wind players are exempt because they must breathe!  It may be said of them, in the way that nature abhors a vacuum, these musicians abhorred silence, even those silences clearly indicated with rests by the composer.

As one listens to ‘Chapelle de Guillaume Tell’ played by Berman, Brendel or Ciccolini, the mind wanders and the rhetorical gesture, inaccurately rendered, sounds vapid. As Novacek delivers it, we understand, metaphorically speaking, precisely what Liszt is talking about, and exactly why he chose to begin his journey through the marvels of Switzerland in Tell’s chapel. With punctuation restored to the topic sentence of the  paragraph, so to speak, what had seemed desultory and vague stands revealed as an utterance of rare eloquence.

Of course many more attributes combine to make Novacek’s Swiss Année so compellingly beautiful. His sense of pace is leisurely and alluring, making the crystal-clear waters of Lac de Wallendstadt, marked Andante placido, not only placid but a veritable balm for the agitated spirit. Liszt’s evocation of an alpine storm, ‘Orage’, sheds its familiar guise as a piano tour de force, to emerge as the sound portrait of a genuinely terrifying natural phenomenon.

Infinite degrees of pianissimo shadings enhance the simple rusticity of the ‘Pastorale’ and coax the faint sound of distant bells from Geneva as though through a fog. Rhetorical aptness is again the focus in ‘Vallée d’Obermann’, which seems less a case study in the numbness of depression than Obermann’s plaintive search for existential meaning. The most refined blend of legato and secco articulation captures the geysers and spray of ‘Au bord d’un source’ in a dazzling display of light and colour. As if all this were not enough, Novacek crowns his Années with the Six Consolations in exquisitely lyrical performances of the utmost sincerity.

Landor has reproduced Novacek’s healthy, sumptuous sound with great clarity. All three books of Années de pèlerinage, played by Daniel Grimwood on an 1851 Erard piano, has been released recently (it was enthusiastically reviewed by Robert Matthew-Walker in March 2009). Though I’ve not yet heard it, it is probably this recording to which Novacek’s should be compared, rather than to those of his illustrious predecessors, whom he has, in so many ways, already surpassed. Very highly recommended.

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