A Disappointing Survey of Czech Piano Music

Czech pianist Jan Bartoš (from the Old First Concerts event page for last night’s recital)

Last night in the Old First Presbyterian Church, the 2022 San Francisco International Piano Festival presented the second of the three Old First Concerts recitals to be performed at that venue. The recitalist was Czech pianist Jan Bartoš, making his West Coast debut. The program consisted entirely of music by Czech composers.

Each half of the program began with a composition by Leoš Janáček. Bartoš opened with the piano sonata given the title “1.X.1905;” and the second half of the program began with the four-movement cycle entitled “In the Mists.” The sonata was followed by a collection of eight preludes composed by Miloslav Kabeláč, and the program concluded with the cycle of six character pieces by Bedřich Smetana entitled Sny (dreams).

There was no shortage of intensity in Bartoš’ approach to any of his selections. Sadly, those (like myself) that chose to view the live stream of the performance were deprived of the usual PDF download of the program book. (I know there was a program book because the Festival’s Artistic Director, Jeffrey LaDeur, was holding it in his hand while introducing Bartoš to the audience!)

Those unfamiliar with the opening sonata were at a particular disadvantage, because this sonata presented Janáček at his most political. On the date that serves as the sonata’s title a worker named František Pavlík was bayoneted during a rally in support for a Czech university in Brno. Similarly, each of the Kabeláč preludes had its own characteristic title. The video stream provided a list of those titles, but its appearance was too short to be meaningful to any viewers. Sadly, a movement-by-movement display of those titles seemed to be beyond the skill set of the video crew.

However, any technical difficulties were quickly forgotten during the second half of the program. For both of the selections Bartoš took a disturbingly aggressive approach to the keyboard. It goes without saying that any connotations of mist in the Janáček did not stand a chance. Granted, there are always undercurrents of intensity in Janáček’s solo piano compositions. However, Bartoš simply thundered away through the cycle’s four movements, undermining any subtleties in the composer’s rhetorical stances.

The same could be said for his approach to Smetana. There is a generous scope of diversity across those six character pieces. From a thematic point of view, the attentive listener could distinguish one from another. However, Bartoš seemed more interested in hammering away at each of the themes, rather than evoking the connotations of each selection’s title. Any sense of dreamlike qualities in his interpretation came across as merely coincidental.

That plan for last night’s program suggested that the evening would be an engaging visit to different Czech approaches to expressiveness, but Bartoš’ performance did little to account for such suggestions.