Vítězslav Novák

condition (records/box): NM / EX

Insert included.

The great Czech conductor Václav Talich called Vítězslav Novák (1870-1949) "the greatest landscape painter of Czech music" - a description that fits the symphonic poems and the monumental cantatas, but sits at an angle to the six Sonatinas of 1919-20, which are among the most refined and intimate things he wrote. Novák was a student of Antonín Dvořák at the Prague Conservatory, where his classmates included Josef Suk and Oskar Nedbal; after Dvořák's departure for America in 1892, his musical allegiances shifted toward Schumann, Brahms, and later Grieg, before a stay in Moravia and Slovakia in 1896 turned him definitively toward folk music as a compositional resource. The landscape poems and the great cantata The Storm (1910) belong to that Moravian-inflected middle period, the works through which his name spread internationally around the turn of the century.

The Sonatinas Op. 54 come from a late phase of consolidation - smaller in scale than the symphonic poems, untroubled by the overriding dramatic ambitions of the major works, instead achieving something more elusive: the quality of a particular light, a particular season, the intimacy of the domestic interior rather than the exposed landscape. Six individual pieces, each with its own character, their modernity consisting less in technique than in a quality of understatement that the earlier works often sacrifice to their more overt ambitions.

Performed by František Rauch (1910-1996), Novák's personal pupil and the pre-eminent Czech interpreter of his piano music, whose advocacy kept this repertoire alive through decades when it attracted little international notice. Original Supraphon 2LP box pressing.