Dušek Piano Works – Naxos

The name alone is enough to cause trouble. František Xaver Dušek — or Franz Xaver Dussek in the Germanized spelling that appears on this Naxos release — has spent roughly two centuries in the shadow of a composer he was apparently not even related to, Jan Ladislav Dussek, whose colorful biography (the sideways piano, the serial romantic catastrophes, the spectacular physical decline) has a way of colonizing any discussion of the Dussek name. One prominent journal recently managed to attribute Jan Ladislav’s entire scandalous curriculum vitae to Franz Xaver, which tells you something both about the confusion surrounding these composers and about the risks of writing quickly. Franz Xaver deserves better. He was a serious figure in Bohemian musical life, a colleague of Mozart’s, a man who hosted the composer in Prague — his wife, the soprano Josefa, sang in the premiere of Don Giovanni — and a composer of some forty symphonies, which is not a negligible output by any measure.

These four symphonies, believed to be among his earlier efforts, will not displace Haydn. That needs saying plainly. But the comparison is almost beside the point.

What Dušek offers here is something more modest and, in its own way, more charming: the sound of an intelligent, craft-conscious composer working fluently within the Galant idiom, keeping his textures clean, his melodic ideas shapely, his transitions brisk. There’s a particular pleasure in the way he handles his slow movements — a certain Viennese elegance in the phrase-shaping, the kind of thing that makes you think of a well-cut coat rather than a grand gesture. Nothing here reaches for the sublime. But the wit is real, the craftsmanship consistent, and the music has an immediacy that recordings of minor eighteenth-century figures don’t always manage to capture.

Credit for that immediacy belongs substantially to Aapo Häkkinen and the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra. Häkkinen is young, Finnish, primarily a harpsichordist — an unusual profile for a director of this repertoire — and he brings to it a lightness of touch and a rhythmic alertness that suit Dušek’s aesthetic exactly. The strings have presence without heaviness. The winds cut through cleanly. And Häkkinen’s decision to direct from the fortepiano rather than the harpsichord is an interesting choice: the instrument appears sparingly, mostly as textural coloring rather than structural support, but its presence gives the ensemble a grounded, chamber-music intimacy that works beautifully in this music.

The recorded sound is generally superb — open, well-balanced, with just an occasional edge of hardness when the full orchestra pushes into its loudest passages.

Fifty-three minutes is not a lot of disc for your money. And there are moments when you wish Häkkinen would let the music breathe a fraction more, particularly in the slower movements, where a slightly more relaxed pulse might allow Dušek’s melodic lines to register with greater warmth. But these are minor complaints against a disc that accomplishes something genuinely useful: it makes a persuasive case for a composer most listeners have never heard, in performances that feel alive rather than merely dutiful.

If Naxos intends this as the first volume of an ongoing series, the prospect is welcome. Dušek wrote forty symphonies. On the evidence here, the exploration has only started.