![]() ![]() According to the tenor Audebert Koreček, Janáček’s pupil Břetislav Bakala (1897–1958) ‘found The diary of one who disappeared in the chest. He wrote to his brother Karel on 5 October 1919: ‘I am finishing my life’s work, although it is not in the shape that I would wish it to be.’ Janáček put the Diary in the painted chest where he kept his manuscripts. On 11 March 1919, he finally announced to Kamila that the Diary was ‘finished’, though in fact the autograph has a completion date of 6 June 1919 and Janáček continued to revise it for several months. Other projects (including The excursions of Mr Brouček) intervened, and when Janáček looked at the Diary again nine months later he told Stösslová (on 2 September 1918) that he was not yet happy with it, and thought it ‘a pity that my gypsy girl cannot be called something like Kamilka’. During Christmas of 1917 (24 December), Janáček wrote to Kamila that ‘I always thought about you in this work. At this stage, the Diary was somewhat different from the work it became, and in the first draft the part of Zefka was written for a soprano rather than an alto. The earliest date on the sketches is 9 August, the day before this letter, and on 22 August Janáček wrote to Kamila to say that he would soon have the work finished (this turned out to be optimistic). Perhaps a nice musical romance will come out of it-and a tiny bit of the Luhačovice mood.’ Janáček’s reference to ‘those lovely verses’ suggests that he talked to Kamila about them during their walks in Luhačovice. Janáček kept the cuttings of the anonymous poems about a gypsy girl that had been published in the Brno newspaper Lidové noviny on 14 and (entitled ‘From the writings of a self-taught man’), and he wrote to Kamila on 10 August 1917 after his return from Luhačovice, telling her that he had spent the afternoons back in Brno ‘composing a number of motifs for those lovely verses about that gypsy love. ![]() The earliest work to be inspired by their meeting was The diary of one who disappeared (JW V/12), a song cycle for tenor, contralto, female voices and piano. Hyperion’s sound is superfine and wonderfully natural … I suspect himself would have been most moved by this exceptional performance’ (MusicWeb International) » Moreĭuring a visit to the Moravian spa town of Luhačovice in July 1917, Janáček met Kamila Stösslová for the first time-a life-changing encounter. It strikes me that Drake may actually be the one pulling the strings his flexibility and ear for detail are exceptional … this interpretation of the Diary surely stands among the best of all, and in terms of modern recordings I feel it trumps the Bostridge/Adès version ultimately by dint of its searing theatricality and the consistently focused performances of these performers. In this sequence he is especially outstanding-I baulk at using the conventional term ‘accompanist’. While much of this is down to Spence’s judiciously deployed dramatic instincts (and his seemingly excellent Czech) the common denominator in all 22 numbers of the Diary here is in fact the pianist Julius Drake. ‘Spence is unquestionably one of our finest singing actors, and his palpable enthusiasm for Janáček is most convenient, given that he is first among the performers here who provide this infrequently performed masterpiece with its most convincing modern recording to date.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |