Alois Hába (1893-1973)
The Complete Piano Works
Miroslav Beinhauer (piano)
rec. 2019-24, Studio 1 of Czech Radio, Ostrava
Supraphon SU4357-2 [2 CDs: 133]

Miroslav Beinhauer has gone one better than Tomáš Víšek in recording Alois Hába’s complete piano music for Supraphon, as Víšek’s 1996 recording for the label (SU 3146-2 131) omitted early works preserved in manuscript. This body of music isn’t reflective of Hába’s status as leader of the Czech microtonal avant-garde. It’s a more approachable, if sometimes – especially in the early works – rather clotted example of modernist tendencies, not altogether surprising as he was only 21 when the earliest preserved work was written. He wrote traditional, non-microtonal music for the piano between 1914 and 1931, returning to it four decades later with the Six Moods, Op.102 of 1971.    

Beinhauer has been active in Hába’s archives and seems to be the first pianist to study and perform the Sonata of 1914 given that Hába was a violinist and not a pianist, as well as a self-confessed compositional autodidact. Doughty and not altogether idiomatic pianistically it’s largely melodically undistinguished, and the Scherzo and Menuetto movements sound too alike, but it’s helpful to hear it and to understand where he started. The works of 1918 reflect an immersion in Regerian counterpoint. The Three Fugues are brief but were composed during a period of study with Schreker as was the Variations on a Canon of Robert Schumann, Op.1b, to which he gave his first opus number. It’s expansive at nearly 16 minutes and offers sufficient scope for contrast of mood, texture and tempo. It reflects a newly-won compositional freedom for which Schreker must clearly take great credit – though the playfulness and timbral wit, as well as the occasional chore, are Hába’s own. It’s a pity that Víšek didn’t record this in the album cited above.

The nostalgic and old-fashioned Two Pieces, Op.2 are also from 1918 but the next year he wrote the large-scale three-movement Sonata, Op.3. It was a work Schreker praised and even Vítězslav Novák referred to it as ‘a sonata for three hands’, though whether admiringly or dismissively it’s hard to say. Certainly, it’s a work in which the composer first found his authentic voice and though it’s a voice that still contains too many clotted measures and repetitious ideas it’s much more generously written for the performer, albeit taxing for the left hand as Novák noted.

In 1920 Hába wrote the Six Pieces for Piano. In his recording Víšek is prepared to offer a greater sense of time in the introspective second, a slow movement, though both he and Beinhauer are both astute in their playing of the austerely expressive Lento (No.5), which must reflect something of a sense of post-War lassitude. He also explored a brief sequence of dance themes over the second half of the 1920s, a familiar area for jazz or popularly-inclined European composers of the time.  Beinhauer is a much more incisive exponent of the Four Modern Dances of 1926 than Víšek, halving his time in the Shimmy-Blues, for instance. All four pieces are ‘moderato’ so arguably Víšek is idiomatic at a slower tempo but I like both approaches and this is a broad-church area.   

The Toccata quasi una fantasia is an engrossing work timbrally and has remained his most popular. It uses standard sonata form but is highly chromatic and over nine minutes evolves new material without repeating itself. It’s been played twice at the Prague Spring festival since the War – first by Emma Kovárnová in 1973 and then thirty years later in 2003 by Víšek, whose performance of it on disc is slightly tighter structurally than Beinhauer’s.  The Six Moods of 1971 are very short late works constructed to generate their essence in a brief span. Here Víšek and Beinhauer are pretty much in accord, though the former’s recording has a slight halo around it.

Which brings me to the really excellent Czech Radio recordings made between 2019 and 2024 from which these performances are drawn and the accompanying first-class notes. Beinhauer is a devoted exponent who has delved into the manuscripts to round out a portrait of Hába’s body of piano music to advantage.

Jonathan Woolf

Buying this recording via a link below generates revenue for MWI, which helps the site remain free

Contents
Piano Sonata in E flat minor (1914)
Three Fugues (1918)
Variations on a Canon of Robert Schumann, Op.1b (1918)
Two Pieces for Piano, Op.2 (1918)
Piano Sonata, Op.3 (1919)
Six Pieces for Piano, Op.6 (1920)
Two Grotesques for Piano (1920/21)
Romance, Waltz (1921)
Four Modern Dances for Piano, Op.39 (1926)
Shimmy-Fox (1926)
Toccata quasi una fantasia, Op.38 (1931)
Six Moods, Op.102 (1971)