Interview, Leif Ove Andsnes on Dvořák's Poetic Tone Pictures

As artists continue to record and release the results of their various degrees of enforced isolation over the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, it's no surprise that neglected or off-the-beaten-track repertoire has enjoyed an unusual level of interest. One particularly striking example of this is Leif Ove Andsnes's new recording of Dvořák's Poetic Tone Pictures, a cycle of characterful Romantic Albumblätter that has been widely overlooked since its composition.

Leif Ove describes how a childhood acquaintance with this pictorial work was finally able to blossom into a deeper understanding of its music, and ultimately give rise to a much-needed recording - and suggests some reasons for its relative obscurity up until now.

Where did the idea spring from to record the complete set of Dvořák’s Poetic Tone Pictures?

It's been lingering with me for a while - my father had a recording of all of them when I was little, funnily enough. He must have picked it up as part of a random selection of LPs in London when he was there! One of those was the Poetic Tone Pictures with Radoslav Kvapil, a Czech pianist, playing. And I remember listening to them when I was a child and liking them very much - in particular I listened to the first few over and over again. The first one, The Twilight Way, was a piece I played in a youth competition when I was 12, and it attracted me then in the same way as it does today - like opening a book and someone starting to tell a story. You're being brought into this very personal world.

But at that point I didn't know the whole cycle; when I was in my twenties I decided to play about six of the pieces in a recital programme I had, and then I forgot about them again for a while - but I still had in the back of my mind the question of what kind of project it would be to play the whole cycle.

Then suddenly the pandemic arrived and we all had more time amid all the confusion, and I thought I ought to look through Dvořák's piano music in general because I didn't know it. I started reading through, and I found some of it rather uneven and less attractive - but then I came to this cycle and once again I was really impressed. I found it such incredible music. And it wasn't being done anywhere so I decided that I should go for it. I studied all thirteen pieces, and it just became more and more of a great discovery for me. Norway wasn't completely closed down during that part of the pandemic, so I could play smaller concerts with up to two hundred people; I played several recitals featuring these pieces, and in the end I programmed all of them as a cycle.

People reacted very well to them, which encouraged me; I'm now doing this cycle twenty-three times in the coming months, in various international recitals so I'm curious as to how audiences will respond, but certainly in Norway my experience has been of people reacting positively.

It became something of a pandemic project for me to study and record them, which happened in April of 2021.

Given that other pictorial sets of piano pieces – by Schumann, Grieg and others – have become so enduringly popular, why did the Poetic Tone Pictures not enter the mainstream repertoire in the same way?

I think the main difference is the strange reputation that Dvořák has as a piano composer, since he wasn't a professional pianist. His piano concerto has this reputation too. It's wonderful music but one has to admit that it's not necessarily the work of someone who really knows how to project the piano through the orchestral textures. Even the violin concerto is more successful in this respect - violinists will certainly tell you that it's awkward to play, but it succeeds sonically in a way that the piano concerto sometimes doesn't. Even though I do love the music. I've never played it myself but people say that it's very challenging to learn - it's not very obvious.

And with some of the other piano music, when I was looking through it, I had the sense that he hadn't found his "voice" on the instrument. But with time, and once he'd got to this period in his life where he was starting to write programmatic music (it's around the same time as the eighth symphony, which was originally conceived as a programmatic work, as well as many of his symphonic poems) he seems to free himself and become very imaginative. In a quotation about the Poetic Tone Pictures themselves Dvořák said that he had tried to be a poet à la Schumann, even though the pieces don't sound like Schumann themselves; he also said that he wished someone would have the courage to play all of them together, like a cycle! And I was very happy when I found that quote because it reinforced what I had started to feel when I was studying them, the idea of there being real connections and that it would work as one long story.

Certainly in some of the pieces there are awkward passages, because he had a limited understanding of some aspects of the piano; but on the other hand the amount of colours and textures he gets from the piano, and the variety in these pieces, is impressive and sometimes highly original. So that's the side I'd prefer to emphasise in the cycle, rather than the few moments of awkwardness and places which sound easier than they are.

But I think that's the reason - he has this strange reputation. Even so, given how many millions of piano players in the world it's incredible that people don't pick him up. There are probably two million piano students studying Chopin's first Ballade simultaneously and almost certainly none studying Dvořák's Poetic Tone Pictures! He's a famous composer and this is absolutely glorious music so it's a mystery to me. It just shows how unimaginative we are sometimes.

So in addition to the piano writing not always working well with the orchestra, is it also technically difficult?

Oh yes, there are moments - in the fifth piece, the Peasant Ballad there are some very awkward passages, even if they might not sound that difficult. It's analogous to the kind of string writing that has strange and challenging jumps in it. But there aren't really that many.

Another aspect of this idea of Dvořák searching to find his style is that in certain pieces he simply incorporates piano styles from other composers - the fourth piece, the Spring Song, could be a Mendelssohn or Lisztian piece with that "rustle of spring" kind of texture. And in the tenth, the Bacchanale, it's very clear to me that the second trio is modelled on Chopin's third Scherzo, with these chords and then filigree passages in the treble. The first trio, on the other hand, is more like a crazy Scarlatti sonata with those repeated notes.

So he's taking ideas from other composers who he knows write well for the piano. But why not? Composers have always stolen ideas from each other. And there's something in his piano writing which I've always found very attractive - a bell-like quality in the treble, sometimes - and when I've played his famous second piano quintet I've found that he uses that a lot, in combination with warm string writing, and it creates these wonderful layers of sound. And he does it here as well; the trio of the second piece, the Joke, has this wonderful brook-like quality. Very fluid, and very Dvořák, in fact. Nobody writes quite like that for the piano. It shows that he had a talent for writing very originally for the instrument.

When you refer to elements being closely based on other composers, do you think that was a conscious decision by Dvořák - knowing he wanted to write a piano piece but wasn't a pianist, so went looking for models to adapt?

Maybe he just wanted to use things that he already knew worked. Or seeing it as a tool he could use. But his voice is still so clearly there, his harmonies and so on - it's absolutely not like a pastiche. His fantastical invention in both melody and harmony are clear, so it's not a copy of someone else's work at all - he's just adapting one aspect of another composer's piano writing.

We know that despite their widely differing moods, Dvořák thought of these pieces as comprising a unified cycle. What would you say are the threads running through it and holding it together?

It's strange - more than anything, I think the quality itself is what holds things together. When you listen to Schumann's Fantasie, for instance - what makes that a unified piece? It's so rhapsodic. But in the end you do feel like you've been on a coherent, and amazing, journey. And it's the same here - they tell a very diverse story, and I love the mixture between ambitious pieces and enigmatic ones like the Old Castle or the first piece, the Twilight Way, and the drama of At the Hero's Grave, very serious and pompous - and then on the other hand the Joke or Tittle-Tattle, everyday life.

Schumann's Fantasie, performed by Leif Ove Andsnes.

It reminds me a little of late Beethoven, where you have this very spiritual layer of the music and then you have the folkdance or an everyday song. I'm studying the sonata Op.110 at the moment where you have exactly that - the Klagender Gesang [song of lamentation] in the last movement, and the very elevated fugue, and yet the second movement's Scherzo has the feeling of a children's song. And this Dvořák is in that tradition - he's combining high and low. And he builds this up very cleverly, with some of the grander pieces towards the end; the Bacchanale is a very wild, virtuosic dance which is the tenth piece, preceded by a Serenade which develops from an almost banal theme into a real jewel with a feeling of true love. And then you have this very big, pompous piece At the Hero's Grave, which is very dramatic and Lisztian in its feeling, the penultimate piece and the longest in the cycle - and then the most wonderful ending with At the Holy Mountain, which is almost a kind of benediction and has a touching feeling of farewell.

It tells very separate stories but in the end you just feel as if you've been through a great novel!

Are there any other cycles like this that you think are similarly ripe for a revival and should be brought to a broader audience?

Not to this extent or of this quality. Of course there's a lot of music out there, but music of this quality from a famous composer? I would be very surprised if I came across anything comparable in my lifetime. Some people have compared it with a project I did a while ago with Sibelius's piano music, which is true in a sense - he's another composer who is not known at all for his piano music. The difference is that with that album I really had to select carefully which pieces I was going to include; Sibelius has 150 smaller piano pieces and they're of very uneven quality. Some of it is great, because he's a great composer, but the piano didn't come naturally to him, so I had to be selective here and there. The difference here is that we have this complete cycle of "prime time" Dvořák right in front of us, for anybody to see. So as I said, it's a mystery to me how it can be so neglected.