For his many admirers Piotr Anderszewski adds new works to his concert repertoire with infuriating slowness, and takes even longer to record them. But this makes every Anderszewski release a special event, and this collection of miniatures appears three years after his last disc, which was devoted to the second book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. The new one is a typical Anderszewski compilation, and even if the pianist’s claim in a sleeve note that a “spirit of rebellion” pervades all the works here should be taken with a big pinch of salt, the juxtaposition of these three composers, who all worked around the edges of modernism in the early 20th century, makes perfect musical sense.
Largely, too, the performances here are utterly beguiling. In the selection of six mazurkas from Szymanowski’s Op 50, a vast range of seductive colour is conjured from the keyboard, every dart and twist of the phrasing precisely fixed, with the wonderful clarity and slight sense of detachment that are so typical of Anderszewski’s playing. Bartók’s Bagatelles Op 6 – some of them hardly more than a single thread of melody – are perfectly realised too, each one inhabiting its own tiny emotional space. But the five pieces that make up the second book of Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path (dating back to 2016, while the other works were recorded last summer) feel less convincing. Here the music seems to be held too much at arm’s length, its accents too severe, its changes of mood rather forced, so that the result is chilly and impersonal, which Anderszewski at his best, as elsewhere on this disc, never is.
Stream the album on Apple Music Classical (above) or on Spotify
