Word: janacek
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...piano literature for one hand can pretty well be numbered on the fingers of two. Scriabin, Brahms. Ravel and Strauss all took a shot at it, along with such moderns as Benjamin Britten and Leos Janacek.* The rest of the left-hand repertory is pretty much what the trade calls "knitting music." But a platoon of composers in Holland last week was hard at work on some new and surprisingly engaging left-hand pieces to be played by a recent recruit to the field: 45-year-old Dutch Pianist Cor de Groot...
Composer Suchon, who also worked on the libretto, fleshed the bare bones of his plot with some moving psychological insights. The libretto was admirably supplemented by Suchon's muscular score, which reminded the enthusiastic audience of the music of Czechoslovakia's Leos (Jenufa) Janacek and Hungary's Bela Bartok. Strongly rhythmic, it combined rich Slovakian folk flavor with pungently powerful orchestration. In Katrena's lament over her fate, strikingly sung by Soprano Anny Schlemm, and in Ondrej's affecting admission of guilt, Suchon provided crowd-rousing vocal high points that might well place The Vortex...
...operatic stardom. Two years ago she was an offstage voice at the Berlin State Opera; she is now under contract with Berlin for two more seasons. She made her first successes as Princess Eboli in Verdi's Don Carlo, and the Sexton's Widow in Leos Janacek's Jenufa, made her debut at the Metropolitan last spring as Eboli, will return there for several guest appearances next season. In Europe she has been such a spectacular overnight success, notes one British critic, that "she has only to be announced to fill the house...
...There were others, e.g., Hungary's famed Count Geza Zichy (1849-1924), who wrote his own left-hand works; the modern Czechoslovakian Otakar Hollman, who commissioned Janacek's Capriccio...
...overture to the final hymn to freedom, and is even gripping in three long narratives by the prisoners against a background of unnerving orchestral fantasy. Over all hangs an eerie, Kafka-like haze that results partly from the use of exotic folk idiom, partly from acoustical theories that led Janacek to dispense with accepted harmonic transitions. Because of its static quality, Aus Einem Totenhaus has had few performances in the opera house. On records it is the score that counts, and the result is well worth a hearing...