Szymanowski: Piano Works, Vol. 4
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Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) Piano Works, Volume 4 Karol Szymanowski was born in 1882, the same year as both Stravinsky and Kodaly, to an aristocratic...
Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937)
Piano Works, Volume 4
Karol Szymanowski was born in 1882, the same year as
both Stravinsky and Kodaly, to an aristocratic Polish
family in the Ukraine. He was the third of five children,
all of whom pursued careers in the arts, and displayed a
keen interest in both music and literature. Owing to a leg
injury at the age of four his early education was at home,
where, under his father's direction, he began to study the
piano from the age of seven. Later he was sent to his
uncle Gustav Neuhaus's music school to study both
piano and theory. It was under his tutelage that
Szymanowski was introduced to the works of Bach,
Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and, naturally, Chopin. His
first published work was a set of nine Chopinesque
Preludes, written between 1896 and 1900, although not
published until 1906. In 1901 he moved to Warsaw for
further study, taking lessons from Zygmunt Noskowski
in counterpoint and composition and from Marek
Zawirski in harmony. It was here that he established
friendships with a small group of remarkable musicians
who were all to become important interpreters of his
music, the pianist Artur Rubinstein, the violinist Pawel
Kochafski, and the conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg.
Together with Fitelberg and two other students of
Noskowski, Ludomir Ro. zycki and Apolinary Szeluto,
Szymanowski established the group known as 'M1oda
Polska' (Young Poland), in order to publish and promote
new Polish music.
Besides the strong influence of his compatriot,
Chopin, other key influences throughout
Szymanowski's early creative life included the music of
Wagner, Strauss, Reger and Scriabin, as can be heard in
works such as the Symphony No. 2 (1909-10) (Naxos
8.553683) and the one-act opera Hagith (1912-13). With
the outbreak of World War I, Szymanowski returned
home from travel abroad that had taken him to Italy,
Sicily, Algiers, Constantine, Biskra and Tunis,
concentrating his attention on composition. Having by
now discovered the music of Debussy, Ravel and
Stravinsky, thereby freeing himself from the clutches of
late German romanticism, he reached his creative
maturity in a series of works written in 1915 that
included Metopes for piano (Naxos 8.553016), Myths
for violin and piano, and Songs of the Fairy Princess
(8.553688) for coloratura soprano and piano. Until the
shattering experience of the Russian Revolution, in
which his family estate was destroyed, this was
Szymanowski's most fertile creative period. Other key
works written around this time include the Third
Symphony (1914-16) (8.553684), the First Violin
Concerto (1916) (8.553685), the twelve Etudes (1916)
and the First String Quartet (1917).
It was following a trip to Paris in 1921, when
Szymanowski had the overwhelming experience of
hearing Stravinsky play Les Noces at the piano (the two
had met for the first time in London in 1914) that
Szymanowski felt inspired to write a series of works
drawing on the folk-music of the Tatra mountains in
southern Poland. This third creative phase witnessed the
creation of the one-act ballet Harnasie (1923-31) and
the String Quartet No. 2 (1927) (Naxos 8.554315)
among other works. Szymanowski died at a Lausanne
sanatorium in 1937 at the age of 54, having succumbed
to a tubercular infection.
Szymanowski's Nine Preludes, Op. 1, contain what
is thought to be his earliest surviving works. The seventh
and eighth of the set were composed in 1896 when the
composer was only fourteen. All nine of these vignettes
are exquisitely crafted and possess an uncommon
melodic beauty. Providing a suitably arresting
centrepiece to the set as a whole, the figurations of the
dramatic fifth prelude, marked Allegro molto,
impetuoso, are particularly indebted to Chopin's Etude
in C minor, Op. 10, No. 10.
Composed between 1901 and 1903, the Variations
in B flat minor, Op. 3, remain quite strongly bound to
classical formal principles, with the variations generally
adhering to the phrase structure of the theme. The
variations are characterized by an incredible variety of
mood and texture, from the hymnic simplicity of the
eighth variation to the virtuosic perpetuum mobile of the
concluding twelfth variation, and from the wistful
mazurka of the third variation to the serene waltz of the
ninth.
The twenty Mazurkas, Op. 50, were composed in
Zakopane in 1924-25 and were published in five sets of
four. The influence of the Goral folk-music of the Tatra
mountains can be discerned throughout, characterized
by sharpened fourths and flattened sevenths, melodic
ornamentation, irregular phrase lengths, and the use of
the so-called dudowa kwinta, a reiterated open fifth that
recreates the drone effect of the dudy, the Polish
bagpipes. In his book on the composer, B.M.
Maciejewski remarks of this period that Szymanowski
took great delight in listening "to the music, cries and
noises, watching the happy dancers full of vigour,
passions and sweat. Even the wooden floor and the
wooden cottage danced together with the Gorals".
Szymanowski's final return to the mazurka came at
the end of his life. The Two Mazurkas, Op. 62, were
composed in 1933-34 and were his last completed
works. One of the very few extant recordings of
Szymanowski is his performance in 1933 of the first of
these mazurkas, a piece he was especially fond of. The
première of the work took place in November 1934 at a
private concert in London, at the home of the work's
dedicatee, Sir Victor Cazalet.
The delightful, if all too brief, Valse Romantique
was composed in 1925 as a tribute to Emil Hertzka on
the occasion of Universal Edition's 25th anniversary
(Hertzka was the publishing firm's resolutely forwardlooking
Managing Director from 1907 to 1932). Only
discovered in 1967, its harmonic language offers
perhaps the most overt display of Szymanowski's
Francophile sensibilities.
Szymanowski completed his Sonata No. 3, Op. 36,
in 1917. His last major work for piano, it is cast in a
single continuous movement while at the same time
embracing the four conventional subdivisions of the
orthodox sonata: a dynamic first movement notable for
its elevation of the second subject to a position of
thematic precedence, an elegiac slow movement in
ternary form in which whole-tone harmonies
predominate throughout, a short yet metrically
adventurous scherzo and a dazzling and technically
daunting fugal finale, at the climax of which the first
movement's second subject returns in seamless
combination with the fugal subject.
Peter Quinn
9 Preludes, Op. 1 (more info)
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Prelude No. 1: Andante ma non troppo - 2:11
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Prelude No. 2: Andante con moto - 2:29
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Prelude No. 3: Andantino - 1:23
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Prelude No. 4: Andantino con moto - 1:35
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Prelude No. 5: Allegro molto impetuoso - 1:12
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Prelude No. 6: Lento mesto - 2:07
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Prelude No. 7: Moderato - 2:51
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Prelude No. 8: Andante ma non troppo - 2:44
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Prelude No. 9: Lento mesto - 2:25
Variations in B flat minor, Op. 3 (more info)
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Tema Andantino tranquillo e semplice - 1:04
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Variation 1: L'istesso tempo - 0:56
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Variation 2: Agitato - 0:30
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Andante quasi tempo di mazurka - 1:07
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Variation 4: Con moto - 0:13
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Variation 5: Lento dolce - 0:58
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Scherzando - 0:16
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Allegro agitato ed energico - 0:29
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Variation 8: Meno mosso: Mesto - 1:03
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Tempo di Valse - 0:42
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Variation 10: Andantino - 0:36
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Andantino dolce affettuoso - 1:30
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Variation 12: Allegro con fuoco - 1:48
20 Mazurkas, Op. 50 (more info)
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Mazurka No. 17: Moderato - 2:42
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Mazurka No. 18: Vivace: Agitato - 3:02
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Mazurka No. 19: Poco vivace - 1:30
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Mazurka No. 20: Allegramente: Con brio - 3:01
2 Mazurkas, Op. 62 (more info)
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Mazurka No. 1: Allegretto grazioso - 2:43
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Mazurka No. 2: Moderato - 3:02
Romantic Waltz (more info)
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Valse Romantique - 3:43
Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 36 (more info)
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I. Presto - 6:38
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II. Adagio: Mesto - 5:09
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II. Assai vivace: Scherzando - 1:02
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IV. Fuga - 6:09