Fanny Mendelssohn: Das Jahr – Bjørkøe

Every so often a piece of music comes along that seems to have been waiting for the culture to catch up with it. Das Jahr is one of those. Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel composed it in 1841 in Berlin, and it is only in the last generation or two that pianists have begun treating it as something more than a curiosity appended to her brother’s shelf of scores.

Christina Bjørkøe has lived with this music a long time. She recorded it once before, decades ago, for a Danish label that has since vanished into the vinyl afterlife, and this remake, taped at the Danish National Academy of Music in Odense, has the unhurried confidence of a pianist who no longer needs to prove the piece is worth playing. She simply plays it.

That matters, because Das Jahr resists easy advocacy. Twelve character pieces, one per month, plus a Postlude that closes the cycle with a chorale. On paper it looks like a Romantic almanac, postcards from the Italian trip Fanny took with her husband Wilhelm Hensel and their son Sebastian in 1839–40. Venice, Rome, a year abroad accumulating slowly. But anyone who approaches this as programmatic scene-painting will come away puzzled. The German scholar Gottfried Eberle has argued that the correspondences between the music and specific Italian sights are tenuous at best, that the cycle works better as absolute music, unencumbered by tourist itinerary. I split the difference. Listening straight through, I heard both things: something that could be lagoon-light shimmering in “Venedig,” and five minutes later, pure motivic engineering that has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with Fanny’s ear for large-scale form.

Because that is the real story here, and it’s one R. Larry Todd has laid out with some rigor in his biography: this is not a loose bouquet of pieces. It’s cyclical in the deep sense, closer kin to Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze than to any set of genre pieces by Field or early Mendelssohn-the-brother. “January,” headed by its dream epigraph, plants melodic seeds that resurface transformed in “February,” “May,” “June,” “August.” There’s an overarching key scheme too, one that only reveals itself on repeated hearings. You start to sense the tonal argument the way you sense weather changing, before you can name it.

Bjørkøe understands this architecture and trusts it. She doesn’t oversell the “September” harvest-glow or milk the Adagio grief of “November” — a movement that carries real weight once you know Fanny lost her mother that year and folded a Lutheran chorale straight into the piano texture, an intrusion of Bach-ish severity into a Romantic diary. The chorale returns, transfigured, in the Postlude, and Bjørkøe times its arrival beautifully: no underlining, no italics, just the plain statement of a hymn tune emerging out of decorative figuration like a face appearing in a window.

Her sound is lean rather than lush. Some will want more sustaining pedal, more of the blurred, harp-like resonance that pianists like Frederike Sabban or Lauma Skride bring to this repertoire. Bjørkøe favors clarity: inner voices audible, bass lines articulate, tempos on the brisk side of moderate. In “March” this pays off handsomely; the piece has a nervous, scurrying energy that turns almost Mendelssohnian-brother in its filigree, and she lets it dart. In “July,” though, I wanted a touch more sultriness, more give in the rubato. The writing here is thick, almost orchestral in its doublings, and a slightly more indulgent hand — Igor Levit has recorded excerpts, though not the complete cycle, with striking opulence — might find more sensuous weight in the left-hand writing.

None of which is a serious complaint. It’s a matter of temperament, hers versus what I imagined before I pressed play. Always a critic’s private argument, half unfair.

What struck me most, actually, was how completely the disc erases the old condescension toward Fanny as “the untrained one,” the sister who supposedly lacked her brother’s polish. Nonsense — always was. The counterpoint in “October” is as tightly argued as anything in Felix’s op. 35 fugues, and the modulatory sleight-of-hand throughout the cycle belongs to a composer who had absorbed Bach and Beethoven thoroughly, then found her own harmonic voice, chromaticism edging toward the world Brahms would inhabit decades later.

The Danacord engineering is warm, close without being claustrophobic, the piano — a modern Steinway, unfussed-over in the notes — captured with just enough room tone to breathe. Odense’s academy hall gives a soft bloom to the bass without smearing it. You can hear hammer-attack in the louder passages, which I like; too many piano recordings sand that away.

Is this the Das Jahr to own, if you own only one? I’d still point newcomers first toward Sarah Rothenberg’s thoughtful older account, or to the interpretive richness some younger players have brought since Todd’s book put the piece properly on the map. But Bjørkøe’s is a clear