Smetana was a considerably more advanced composer than his most popular music would suggest, capable of Lisztian excursions into piano pyrotechnics and near-atonality, also into some ruminative polkas that approach a little way towards Chopin in their poeticization of a national dance form. Ivan Klansky is at his happiest in the latter, and he gives charming, sometimes engagingly sly accounts of polkas that include a delightful Souvenir of Pilsen and a heftier one called From Student Life (“Aus dem Studentenleben”) as well as of the three Polkas de Salon that form Op. 7. He is, surprisingly, less effective with the suite of Bagatelles and Impromptus of 1844, a cycle of eight short pieces on moods associated with the girl who was to be Smetana’s first wife. They are beautiful pieces, capable of disclosing greater subtlety and deeper reserves of feeling than these sometimes rather disengaged performances suggest.
With Dreams (“Reves”), a substantial suite that has often been related to the orchestral cycle Ma vlast, he attacks too hard, as if he also had Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in mind. The sound becomes clangy, the fingerwork hectic and at times indistinct. Even Radoslav Kvapil can be rather too forceful, in his Unicorn-Kanchana record, which also includes Dreams and the Op. 7 Polkas: it adds, among smaller pieces, the Lisztian tone-poem Macbeth and the Witches. For those who do not propose to follow Klansky on his exploration of all Smetana’s piano music, Kvapil is certainly a good alternative.'