Spring (Jaro), Op.22a (1902)

Although Suk’s first instrument was the violin - he was a member of the Czech Quartet for more than forty years - he was also an accomplished pianist and actually wrote far more for piano than for violin. Most of the piano music is in eight collections of short pieces culminating in About Mother Op.28 and Things Lived and Dreamed Op.30, both of them written just a few years after the trauma caused by the death of his wife Otilka in 1905. Spring Op.22a and its companion suite Summer Impressions Op.22b date from 1902 and the very much happier circumstances after the birth of Suk’s son and before the death of his much loved father in law and teacher Antonin Dvorak.

One of the few features Spring has in common with Janacek’s In the Mist is the way the pieces are constructed out of repetitions and variations of short melodic phrases. One particular phrase, the jubilant three-note figure following immediately on the three opening chords, is heard literally dozens of times, though perhaps in inversion or in some kind of extension, during the course of the five short movements. Clearly, since it is scarcely ever absent from the first piece, which bears the same title as the suite itself, that phrase is a spring-time inspiration abundant in creative potential and no less spontaneous in its expressive transformations if the piano writing happens to recall Schumann or Chopin here and there. The three-note phrase is not very evident in the capricious figuration of The Breeze, which seems to derive from a Parisian salon rather than a Czech composer’s workshop, but a brief emphasis on the three notes in rising order indicate that it has been there in the melodic line all the time. While it is not presented as the main theme of In Expectation, the fluctuating emotions of which are motivated by its own lyrical material, the three-note phrase in descending order is worked into the expressive fabric of every section of the piece.

Perhaps the most interesting of the five pieces is the fourth (it has no title apart from its Andante tempo heading) which is a thoughtful improvisation on the three-note phrase in a solitary melodic line poised in the right hand over alien harmonies strummed in the left. Its melancholy implications are not so much resolved as evaded in the delicate figuration of the closing bars. Longing is based on a melodiously extended version of the three-note phrase, in both its falling and its rising forms, which is resourcefully coloured and passionately developed in the most liberated declaration in the set.