It was in Prague and Brno, the two largest cities in what is now the Czech Republic, that Antonin Dvorak and Leos Janacek - the principal representatives of the nineteenth-century Czech national school, along with Bedrich Smetana - launched their respective compositional careers. Whiel Janacek, thirteen years younger than Dvorak, saw the latter as a father figure, the two men shared the same poetic Slavic soul. Indeed, Janacek said of Dvorak: ''I could exchange his personality for his works; it is as if his melodies came straight from my heart. Nothing can ever break such a 'bond''. In his fourth solo recording for Fuga Libera, Jan Michiels places this shared Slavic consciousness and musicality in the perspective of the almost filial relationship between the two composers, for example by interspersing the pieces from two eminently lyrical cycles: Dvorak's Poetic Tone Pictures, Op. 85 and Janacek's On an Overgrown Path, JW VIII/17.
