Pohadka

Leoš Janáček’s three-movement Pohádka (A Tale) has much to recommend it to concert audiences. Pohádka, inspired by a Russian folk epic, represents Janáček’s only work for cello and piano—this from a composer who excelled in chamber music. Moreover, its motives demonstrate the composer’s organic approach to thematic organization. Janáček likely began sketching the piece around 1908 following the arrival in Brno of a prominent cellist, Rudolf Pavlata. At that time he provided programmatic information about the piece, which he called “A Fairy Tale about Tsar Berendyey.” Since Janáček intended his work only to suggest a generalized folk ethos, the plot details need not detain us. In any event, within a few years he suppressed the extra-musical references, truncated the title, and removed the fourth movement, which he considered superfluous in light of motivic connections already linking the first three. From the start there is something rapturous, even (dare I say it) French in the swirling piano accompaniment, though frequent interruptions by the cello contribute a whimsical edge. Janáček had already proven his ability to evoke strikingly original atmospheres in the earlier piano works (e.g., On an Overgrown Path, begun in 1901). As a composer he often fixates on a single detail, creating taut musical gestures. The first movement is a rounded ABA form capped off with brief coda, which takes a recurrent two-note rhythm and treats it to a frantic interchange between cello and piano. The second movement begins like the first with a buoyant conversation, playful and sweet, between the two instruments. In the finale Janáček cuts and pastes a new strongly-etched cello motive amidst the recurrent lyric theme from preceding movements, producing a free alternation between formal and relaxed moods.

(c) Jason Stell