Piano Works
Piotr Anderszewski (piano)
Warner Classics 5419789127 58:21 mins
It takes a pianist of Piotr Anderszewski’s rare musical intelligence to come up with a programme as simple and direct as this, one featuring a trio of Central European composers who shaped the musical identity of their countries in the early 20th century. As Anderszewski puts it, there is ‘no room here for stylisation or decorum; these works draw upon the very roots of music.’
The Polish pianist is most successful in conveying that in Bartók’s 14 Bagatelles (1908), an outstanding account of the Hungarian composer’s early collection in which folk song mixes so seamlessly alongside original ideas that it can be hard to tell one from the other. From the very spare opening piece onwards, Anderszewski adopts quite deliberate tempos, but still finds the nervous, spiky energy required for example in No. 2 (one of Bartók’s own recital favourites) and No. 14. The mysterious textures in No. 3 are blurred to hypnotic effect.
Somehow, that deliberate approach works less well in the second book of Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path (1900-11) – recorded, oddly, seven years before the rest of the programme. Anderszewski is emphatic, where the Czech composer calls for a more lyrical sense of fantasy. He switches the order of the third and fourth pieces, putting the vigorous Vivo at the centre of things. With Szymanowski’s Mazurkas, more rarefied and later works (1926-31) from the period of the Polish composer’s retreat into the mountains, the only disappointment is that Anderszewski plays only a small selection from the original cycle of 20 pieces. He certainly gives a performance that draws ‘upon the very roots of music’.