Dvořák: Tone Poems, Berliner Philharmoniker / Simon Rattle

Karel Jaromír Erben occupies a similar position in Czech culture as do the Grimm brothers in German-speaking countries. His collection of folk ballads, entitled Kytice (The Garland), became widely read, and was an obvious source for a proudly patriotic composer such as Dvořák, who drew on it for his oratorio The Spectre’s Bride and for a quartet of tone poems composed during the spring and autumn of 1896. In these pieces, Dvořák embedded the speech-rhythms of Erben’s text into the music, and in the case of The Golden Spinning Wheel he created a unique musical form in which the poem is his only template. Although he did not conceive them as a cycle, they are very effective when played as a group; one of Dvořák’s greatest interpreters, Václav Talich, often used to programme The Water Goblin, The Noon Witch and The Wood Dove as a sequence.

With his lifelong enthusiasm for Janáček, it is not surprising that Sir Simon Rattle has added the Erben tone poems to his repertoire; these new recordings were made live in Berlin in the spring of 2004. Sir Simon’s view is quite distinctive. He brings out the fairy-tale aspects of the poems, seeing them as Bohemian cousins of Ravel’s Mother Goose. The opening clip-clopping music of The Golden Spinning Wheel has rarely sounded so charming, and the Berliners’ response to the passage in which the king finally finds his true love (CD 1, track 4 at 3’35”) is heartbreakingly tender. He is also alert to the kinship with Mahler in the lambent funeral march with its offstage trumpets in The Wood Dove, and also with Janáček, the music describing the wood dove’s accusatory song could have come straight out of Kát’a Kabanová.

He rather underplays the cruelty and violence to be found in these scores. Kubelik, by comparison, makes something genuinely shocking of the Noon Witch’s exit, and Harnoncourt (with the Royal Concertgebouw) are altogether rawer in their response to the horrors of Erben’s dark narratives. Kubelik’s accounts (on DG) are terrific, although the recordings sound a bit fierce these days. The best modern options are Harnoncourt and the new Rattle. The Berliners play these extremely difficult scores beautifully, and EMI’s warm recorded sound complements Sir Simon’s affectionate approach.