After Edward Gardner’s surveys of Lutoslawski and Bartók for Chandos, he now starts on a series of Janacek recordings in Bergen, where he takes over as music director next year. While both the Sinfonietta and the suite, extracted from the score of The Cunning Little Vixen by Charles Mackerras (the greatest of Janacek interpreters), receive fine performances – and in the case of the Sinfonietta’s later movements, particularly feisty, urgent ones – it’s the account of the wonderfully quirky Capriccio between them with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as soloist that hogs the limelight. Written in 1926 for the Czech pianist Otakar Hollmann, who had lost the use of his right hand in the first world war, it’s one of Janacek’s latest and strangest creations, juxtaposing the piano with an ensemble of flute, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba in music that sometimes seems to echo Dvorak and Brahms, and sometimes veers towards Stravinsky. Bavouzet captures that sense of dislocation very well, if not quite finding the poetry within it that Rudolf Firkusny does on his classic Deutsche Grammophon recording.
