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Fanfare

This is a superbly performed recital of chamber music from a stylistically conservative but highly original trio of Polish composers. 20th Century Polish Chamber Music opens with a youthful violin sonata by Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937), considered the greatest Polish composer after Chopin (and certainly the best known of these three). He is probably best known for his atmospheric Myths, for violin and piano, which is far more inward looking and ethereal than this exuberant sonata, which was written when the composer was just 20. The three-movement work from 1904 can best be described as Brahmsian; unabashedly emotional and sweeping in its impact, but without ever veering into sentimentality.

Andrzej Panufnik’s early Piano Trio barely survived World War II, during which endless piles of musical scores were destroyed in air raids, fires, and in this case, the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Panufnik (1914-1991) was able to recreate it from memory in 1945, and treated the work, which had been one of his earliest public successes in 1936, as a long-lost child that had been rediscovered. He continued to tinker with it, including for the 1977 revision that is heard here. It is a stellar work, bursting with youthful energy and high lyricism. The Largo is especially effective; compact yet deeply expressive. That characterization can be applied to the whole work, which clocks in at about fifteen minutes. This superb music deserves to enter the standard repertoire of piano trio music.

Of the three Polish composers featured on this recital, Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969) is prob­ably the least well known, but her story is, for me, the most interesting. She was a complete musi­cian, in the Mozartian sense. She played piano and violin professionally as a young woman, often playing both instruments on the same program. She gave up public piano performance at age 20 but continued to play the violin until 1953. She also began composing at an early age, performing her own music by the age of 15. This violin sonata, premiered in 1949, fits in nicely with the companion music on this disc; it is firmly tonal, arguably neo-Romantic, but distinctive in voice and emotional spirit. I have also heard some of the solo piano music of Bacewicz (in live recital) and similarly found it to be both gripping and beautiful to behold.

Chosen by Peter Burwasser of Fanfare in his 2021 Want List (top 5 albums of the year)