Among Bohuslav Martinů’s five piano concertos, his Fourth (1956) is arguably the most original and inventive, and certainly the most difficult from the standpoint of coordinating and balancing ensemble and soloist. The orchestral writing alternates between sections of massive, complex scoring and the most delicately exposed concertante passages. The pianist, moreover, has to navigate buckets of notes and avoid being submerged by the thick textures. Ivo Kahánek does this and more. He brings assertive drive to the first movement’s chordal outbursts and vertiginous coda, the latter boasting more urgency and heft than in Robert Kolinsky’s relatively lighter traversal under Vladimir Ashkenazy (Ondine, 1/10). Kahánek’s full-bodied unfolding of the motoric solo about a minute and a half into the second movement gives a kind of Bachian weight to the left-hand pedal notes that contrast with, say, Rudolf Firkušný’s fluent lyricism (RCA, 4/95). Although Jakub Hrůša elicits a wide range of colours from his Bamberg musicians, Libor Pešek and the Czech Philharmonic handle the trickier rhythmic challenges more decisively; you only need compare the rapid interplay in the first movement’s opening pages to hear the difference, especially in the percussion.

The orchestral image is more blended and diffuse in the Dvořák Concerto, recorded two years earlier than the Martinů. As a consequence, the woodwinds lack the presence and vivacity that abound in the Aimard/Harnoncourt recording (Teldec, 1/04), although one must credit the robust yet well-defined strings. Kahánek makes Dvořák’s occasionally unwieldy keyboard-writing sound effortlessly idiomatic (the pianist uses the original text), and also points up the Allegro agitato’s debt to the first movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto. He allows himself a discreet amount of wiggle-room in the finale’s wonderful ‘Stranger in Paradise’ second subject, and brings more than a few inner voices to the fore. Yet I miss the perkier accents, the overall spontaneity and clearer sound that still distinguish Vassily Primakov’s recording with Justin Brown and the Odense Symphony Orchestra (Bridge, 2/10) as my version of reference. Supraphon’s booklet contains an extensive and thoughtful interview with the pianist and the conductor, with English, French and German translations accompanying the original Czech text.