Awaiting liftoff: Adès plays Janáček at the Wigmore Hall
Janáček piano works
Thomas Adès
Wigmore Hall
Stalls C2, £5 (under-35s)
9 December 2018
Wigmore page
Programme:
Along an overgrown path (Book I)
Na památku
Sonata I.X.1905 'From the Street'
Along an overgrown path (Book II)
Narodil se Kristus Pán
Malostranský palác
Vzpomínka
In the Mist
I’ve yet to have my Janáček epiphany. I’m told it will come and thereupon the doors to a new world of music appreciation will open. Diligently I place myself in the epiphanic runway, but always I am left behind. Tonight’s music, devotedly performed by a musician I admire, was no different: all pleasant enough, and certainly idiosyncratic, but not something to which I can imagine returning voluntarily.
But then perhaps an all-Janáček piano programme is not the best way to display his greatness. While I don’t doubt that Adès thought long and hard about the particular pieces to include and the in order in which to play them, that very idiosyncrasy makes the evening two hours of variations on the same gently melancholic theme, some more successful, some less successful. Given that this is explicitly the structure of the closing piece In the Mist, perhaps that was even the intention; maybe that’s the kind of thing that gets Janáček-heads going.
Left out in the cold, I could nevertheless feel the beauty of much of Janáček‘s writing, and the reverence of Adès’s performance. I wonder, though, at his use of quite so much pedal, mushing the central textures into a vagueness that I don’t think helped me differentiate the pieces or what they were meant to be. Like his Beethoven cycle, I sense that as a Janáček performer Adès is perhaps more interested in exploring where an extreme approach takes him than playing it exactly how he feels it should be played. But to test that I would have to listen to some more Janáček, which I am disinclined to do.
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