Pan, op. 43

Description

Masterpiece of late Czech Romanticism, in its original version for piano: the only modern recording available. For his debut on Piano Classics, Dutch pianist Tobias Borsboom presents an unprecedented recording that will surely captivate music lovers worldwide: the five-movement, hour-long symphonic poem composed by Vitezslav Novak (1870-1949) in 1910. The work is slightly better known through the orchestration made by the composer two years later, but the grand scope, melodic richness, and sumptuous harmonies of Pan remain yet to be discovered, except by the most ardent connoisseurs of Slavic music. Novak composed this work at the peak of his art. It presents a pantheistic and spiritual musical autobiography, drawing inspiration from the idea of the Greek god and the myths associated with him, through music of great richness and profound expressiveness. The forest stirs and murmurs in the manner of Dvorak, but the sea also swells with Debussian sound waves, and one perceives accents of Janacek in the second movement, "The Mountains," of deep melancholy, evoking the atmosphere of Novak's more concise orchestral masterpiece, In the Tatras. As Tobias Borsboom highlights in his valuable essay, the cycle, like Smetana's Ma Vlast, pursues a cyclical unity through the return of themes and leitmotifs. Thus, the initial theme of "Pan" gives the entire work a universal and structuring force. A glorious apotheosis in C major - worthy of Scriabin, Schoenberg, and Strauss in their contemporary works - carries the finale, "Woman," to a transcendent climax. The piano version possesses many qualities, notably the clarity of text and texture, which Tobias Borsboom's interpretation brings to the fore.