Many years ago now Naxos started out with a great idea, and thanks to the ingenuity and great taste of its founder (and the seeming folly of the major labels), taken that idea to great heights. Why, however, Naxos has been content to stay so consistently within the limits of good, while avoiding for the most part the mediocre and, less successfully, the very great or the very poor, will probably never be known. Its policy of focusing attention on the label both as a brand and as the central tenet of its A&R policy may have something to do with it. By making it incumbent on the more active house artists to build their live concert careers with little help from the label, to the extreme degree that rarely does an artist’s face or figure grace a cover, it has insured a certain type of anonymity that may have seeped unintentionally into the recording sessions.
One of Naxos’s greatest performers, the Hungarian pianist Jenö Jandó, has given as much of his considerable heart and soul to the label. In Mozart concerto and Beethoven sonata cycles of the greatest distinction, he has given Naxos a musical foundation of which any label would be proud, and of which, in fact, few can boast. Jandó, however, has been depressingly absent from the new release lists for the last decade or so, apart from an occasional sighting as he doggedly continues Schubert, Bartók and Bach projects.
It turns out that this innocuous-seeming new Bach recital contains one of the most extraordinary piano performances in the catalogue. It’s of the relatively obscure Aria Variata, a series of 10 variations on a markedly unprepossessing little theme, the whole of which reminds me of Mozart’s Variations for piano four hands K. 381. Although Mozart’s theme is gorgeous and galant, and Bach’s is mostly dour, each set has a central heart-tugging harmonic switch into the major at the core of the main theme (and, of course, of each variation) which rivet the listener’s attention when the performer is totally tuned into it as Jandó is.
Jandó’s drily incisive style in Bach has in the past ranged from perfunctory to revelatory, but on this release, and particularly in the Aria Variata, he is in the latter mode, as if he were giving listeners a glimpse into the rarefied cosmic space in which Bach did his greatest work. It’s an unforgettable 16-minute stretch of profound beauty and should be required listening for all those who love music, or want to.
The very slightly resonant sound is unnecessarily drab (but then Jandó is not primarily a colorist, so the harm is minimal), and it helps to experiment with the volume until you find something you like. As is too often usual, Naxos’s liner notes don’t to much justice to the illuminating quality of Jandó’s playing.
– Laurence Vittes
