Janacek’s music for chamber groupings and ensembles has been copiously recorded (there are even duplications of the Allegro he discarded from his Violin Sonata), and the collector can now pick and choose almost any combination. This is rather an awkward one, as the Sonata, and the two early violin and piano pieces, really have little to do with the Capriccio. Ildiko Line is more at home in the Romance, with its somewhat Brahmsian warmth and lyricism, than in the Sonata, whose originalities can elude him. The opening of the final Adagio, for instance, juxtaposes what Janacek’s biographer Jaroslav Vogel (Kassel: 1958) calls ‘a gloomy main theme with a wildly exuberant answer on the violin.’ Hlawatsch sets out the four opening chords gravely, but Line does not catch the peculiarly savage effect of the ‘exuberant answer’ (which is marked feroce) being muted. The second movement, the ‘Balada’, goes rather better, but there are plenty of other versions (including three by Josef Suk) that have a stronger claim.
The Capriccio – a weird piece even by Janacek’s standards – fares rather better. Hlawatsch is clearly intrigued by the music, and attends with care to the extraordinary problems of balance presented by an accompaniment (if one can call it that) for flute, two trumpets, three trombones and tenor tuba. But there are, again, others that seize the imagination more vividly, among them Josef Palenicek, Rudolf Firkusny and not least Paul Crossley.JW