Pamela Howland has chosen works linked by important factors for this fine recital: time in history, place on the map that runs throughout most of the pieces like a black tooth in a peasant's mouth. When I listen to her wonderful versions of pieces from Leoš Janáček's astonishing "On an Overgrown Path" I think of two lines from a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva: "I am happy to live chastely and simply: These piano miniatures, begun in 1902 by a man not quite 50, glow with chasteness and simplicity. Their structure, highly compressed as it is, allowed Janáček to develop a marvelous emotional and tonal consistency as his cycle follows "on an overgrown path." Yet, each piece contains within itself bits of "sun ... pendulum ... calendar." So often in these pieces we are bathed in the moment, although not always in the sun. Janáček quickly, however, can swerve from the moment into passages of memory or hope and despair - passages that invoke the passing of time, like the pendulum. These pieces also suggest darker moments, perhaps in a forest, when longer glimpses of time passing, as on a calendar, remind us of mortality. But we are just as quickly back in the moment and we realize that we have gripped a lifetime in the space of a few short, beautiful minutes. At about the same time that Leoš Janáček was completing "On an Overgrown Path," Béla Bartók began to collect folk songs from his native Hungary and surrounding regions in what is now Slovakia and Romania. He made a particularly significant trip to Transylvania in 1907 where he didn't merely collect songs but lived with the inhabitants of these ancient villages, usually in quite difficult conditions. Ms. Howland has chosen for this recital five works from 1908 to 1909 that grew immediately out of these experiences. "Evening in the Country" (sometimes called "Evening in Transylvania") is perhaps the most famous of these pieces. On the other hand, "The Herdsman's Song" comes from a collection of bagatelles that Bartók considered his first original work. Each selection is based both melodically and modally on the folk songs Bartók collected. Their simplicity adds to their expressiveness, especially to the nuances of sadness at the harshness of life in Transylvania. The later piece in Ms. Howland's recital is a perfect choice to show the direction of Bartók's composition. The "Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs" from 1914 to 1918 maintain their strong connection to the folk song but now one can hear the counterpoint and rhythmic complexity of the later Bartók. Listen especially, for instance, to how "Evening in the Country" re-appears in the first of the "Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs." Once in Moscow I visited the former home, now museum, of the great Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin. Chaliapin's music studio at the back of the house opens onto a beautiful garden. In the middle of the studio stands a gleaming white piano where Sergei Rachmaninov came to play for Chaliapin. No one else, except the babushka, was in the house. She took a liking to me and played Rachmaninov recordings, while I imagined Sergei Vasilievich working through his Preludes and Études-Tableaux. The Prelude in D major, op. 23, no. 4 opens lyrically and a bit pensively with one of those stunning Rachmaninov melodies. The pensiveness lingers thoughout the variations but becomes more and more captivated by movement. The piece concludes simply, wistfully, on notes of quiet thanksgiving. In the midst of widespread turmoil and suffering in Russia, Rachmaninov wrote most of the Études-Tableaux, op. 39, including the A minor, no. 6. It is an intense expression of yearning (listen to the left hand drone while the right hand explores the passing of time) composed to capture a beauty that Alexander Blok, the great Silver Age Russian poet, called "tear-stained and ancient." The B-minor Prelude, op. 32, no. 10, composed in 1910, begins with an almost stately calm that is shortly overcome by determined struggle. The struggle resolves itself into peace and, eventually, into an almost ethereal moment, to be followed again by the decorous melody of the opening. This time, however, Rachmaninov's genius and Ms. Howland's playing do not allow us to hear those notes in the same way. The calm now seems almost artificial, the listener brilliantly destabilized, in the aftermath of the soul-searching that went before. The famous Prelude in B-flat major, op. 23, no. 2 concludes this incisive recital. The early work with its rolling chords and final crescendos seems bathed in the green of that garden in Moscow.
Dick Schneider 
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