Josef Suk, Leoš Janáček, Camerata Zürich

On an Overgrown Path, Leoš Janáček's cycle of fifteen piano pieces, is heard here in a version for string orchestra by Daniel Rumler, a violinist of the Camerata Zürich. This is the first recording of the arrangement. The cycle is framed by two Czech works for strings, Josef Suk's Meditation on the Old Czech Chorale St. Wenceslas and Antonín Dvořák's Notturno. Between its two books the French writer Maïa Brami reads ten short poems of her own, written for this project.

The Camerata Zürich is directed from the lead violin by Igor Karsko, its concertmaster, who later succeeded Thomas Demenga as artistic director. Demenga had suggested the texts, and ECM states that the arrangement was made at Karsko's suggestion. The recording was made in September and November 2017 at Radiostudio Zürich, with Andreas Werner as engineer. Thomas Meyer wrote the liner notes, and the booklet carries Brami's poems with an English translation by Charlotte Leport.

Janáček wrote the pieces between 1901 and 1908, drawing on memories of his Moravian youth and of his daughter Olga. The first book's ten titled miniatures, from Our evenings and A blown-away leaf to The Madonna of Frydek, keep their short, halting phrases in Rumler's scoring. The strings add harmonics, pale sul ponticello colours and long pianissimo lines. The untitled pieces of the second book and three posthumous paralipomena follow the poems. Suk wrote his Meditation in 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War, on a chorale dating back to the twelfth century. Dvořák's Notturno in B major, Op. 40, began as the slow movement of a string quartet.

Reviewing the album in The Strad in 2022, Andrew Mellor recommended it and heard the Suk as "beautifully metallic, crepuscular". He found Brami's French poems a little too metropolitan beside Janáček's village scenes. On AllMusic, James Manheim wrote that Rumler's version "captures the mysterious atmosphere Janáček intended", with the piano figures "skittering across the background like thoughts passing through the mind of the walker".

CD edition, ECM New Series 2597, first released in November 2021. ECM had earlier issued the piano original played by András Schiff on A Recollection.