Andras Schiff cares deeply for this music; of that I have no doubt. And he has evidently gone to some lengths to find a unique sound world for it. At first I wondered if he was maybe recording on the composer’s own piano in some museum-house in the Moravian woods, so recessed and over-resonant is the sound. It turns out in fact to be a modern Bosendorfer, of the kind Schiff favours for Schubert. At any rate it has a similar papery, fortepiano-ish quality in the treble. Some may love it, but not me, I fear.
Placed first on the disc, the four pieces that make up In the Mists respond best to Schiff’s approach. The overall title and the frequent dolce and dolcissimo markings cry out for this kind of impressionistic pedalling and delicacy of touch (the blurring of edges was in any case central to Janaeek’s views on harmony). Something to do with the almost unbearable beauty of Nature and the elements of music itself is enshrined in this cycle; and Schiff is alive to this, though already by the end I was beginning to find the soft-focus acoustic too much of a good thing.
In the Sonata my worries increased. There are many wonderful touches in the first movement, but how starved the treble sounds on this instrument, just where it should sing out. The second movement lacks dramatic tension, mainly because at little more than half the composer’s suggested metronome marking the basic tempo is so very dragging. Once again the uniformity of tone-colour is a limitation in the 15 miniatures of On an Overgrown Path. In No 4, for instance, there is no discernible difference between the main theme at the beginning where Janaeek marks it ‘distant’, and near the end where it should be ‘closer’. I wish I could get over this barrier to a fuller appreciation of what I am sure is Schiff’s strong feeling for the idiom.
Rudolf Firkusny’s two-disc set, recorded in 1972 and including some of the early solo works and the Concertino and Capriccio, remains the obvious library choice (his later single-disc RCA version is deleted). The sound isn’t ideal, but I can live with it more easily than I can with the new issue. Incidentally, beware the recently re-released Andsnes on Virgin Classics – these are immature, overheated readings, unworthy of the fine artist he has since become