Antonín DVOŘÁK (1841-1904)
Moravian Duets
Op 20 (B.50, 1876) [9:24]
Op. 32 (B.60 and 62, 1876) [30:39]
Op.38 (B69, 1877) [8:28]
Simona Šaturová (soprano), Markéta Cukrová (mezzo-soprano), Petr Nekoranec (tenor), Vojtěch Spurný (piano)
Recorded using Dvořák’s own piano in the Antonin Dvořák museum, Prague, 3-8 June 2017
SUPRAPHON SU4238-2 [52:20]
There are lots of USPs to this rather lovely disc. The first is the music itself. It’s not enormously known in the Anglophone world, but it’s actually the music that helped catapult Dvořák to stardom. It was so popular in Vienna that it drew the attention of Brahms, who commended Dvořák to Fritz Simrock, his Berlin publisher. After Simrock published them, he approached Dvořák to write a Czech equivalent of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances. Dvořák responded with the Slavonic Dances, and the rest is history.
We don’t often think of Dvořák as a song composer and, in fairness, we’re a long way from the world of German lieder here; but each of these vocal duets is a real beauty. They originated from Moravian folk poetry that was found in the family of one of Dvořák’s patrons, though the composer wrote his own melodies, and so they are firmly grounded in the popular tradition from which the composer so successfully drew throughout his life. There is a wonderful, folksy lightness to them, with lots of propulsive rhythms and singable tunes. Nearly all are in the major key, with many of them using nature imagery to reflect on love and life, but an occasional minor key masterpiece crops up to vary the mood, most notably “Voda a pláč” (“The water and the tears”, track 17), a poignant reflection on loneliness and isolation. Overall there is a delightful warmth to the music, and it will draw in anyone who hasn’t deliberately set their face against it.
It’s beautifully sung, too. The majority of the duets are sung by the soprano Simona Šaturová and mezzo Markéta Cukrová, whose voices are beautifully matched and which slot into one another pretty much ideally. There is a commendable lack of ego to the way they sing together: it’s as though they subvert themselves to the overall impact of the music, and it proves enormously rewarding. Tenor Petr Nekoranec is slightly less impactful in the first (opus 20) set, but still perfectly good.
The set’s other USP is the piano. It’s Dvořák’s own, an 1879 Vienna-made Bösendorfer, recorded in the Dvorak museum in Prague. It’s hard to get much more authentic than that. It’s clearly not a contemporary instrument, and there’s a woody, almost recessed tone that marks it out as different. However, it’s in no way a difficult listen. In fact, it’s rather charming in its way, and its smaller-sounding tone makes it the perfect instrument to accompany what remains, at its heart, domestic music-making. The acoustic sounds very natural, too: it’s hard to tell whether the voices are intentionally favoured by the recorded balance, or whether it’s a natural consequence of using this older instrument. Either way, it’s never a problem, and there is a huge amount to enjoy.
Like so many series of musical miniatures, the composer never intended them to be listened to as a complete set, and consuming them all at one sitting might blunt their individual impact; so take your time with them and sample them each as delightful in and of themselves. There is much to enjoy here.
Simon Thompson
Previous review: Jonathan Woolf
