Overgrown Path

Overgrown Path is pianist Meritxell Noguer‘s pairing of two composers who seem, at first glance, to have nothing in common: Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), the Slavic opera master, and Jan Fité (b. 1992), a Catalan double bassist and composer working in chamber and audiovisual music. The album’s anchor is Book I of Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path, ten short pieces written over eleven years that function as a musical autobiography, shadowed by the death of his daughter Olga and his commitment to Czech language and folk idiom. The cycle moves from the march-like “Our Evenings” and the harmonium-inflected “The Frýdek Madonna” through the stark, suspended grief of “Unutterable Anguish” and “In Tears” to the circling close of “The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away!”

Fité’s Siluetes en la boira (Silhouettes in the Mist) was composed for this project and receives its premiere recording here. Its three movements — hovering chords and whispered melodies recalling Mompou, an obsessively pared-down folk-like tune, and a light, dance-driven finale — turn out to share Janáček’s clarity, restraint, and “imaginary folklore,” as if the new piece were a continuation of the older cycle. Noguer, who worked closely with the composer, shapes both works as one continuous thread, bringing out their shared simplicity and introspection through meticulous pedalling, layered voicing, and finely graded dynamics. Recorded at Emil Berliner Studios, it’s a thoughtful, tightly conceived program where two biographies, a century apart, meet on common ground.

Meritxell Noguer, piano