KAROL SZYMANOWSKI Works For Solo Piano

 

Sonata No.3

Métopes 3 Poems For Piano: Isle Of Mermaids; Calipso; Nausicaa

Masques

 

Karol Szymanowski is now considered one of the most important Polish composers; a truly individual figure and a cosmopolitan man who had strong artistic aspirations for his homeland. Piotr Anderszewski is a fervent champion of his relatively neglected compatriot, whose music has still not made it into the mainstream elsewhere. With the support his music has received recently from artists such as Piotr and Simon Rattle, there are at last signs of a resurgence of interest.

 

The piano cycle Métopes takes its poetic inspiration from Homer’s Odyssey, interpreting the stories in the manner suggested by the sculptural métopes of Sicily. Masques, also a set of piano pieces, presents parody portraits of literary figures such as Scheherazade and Don Juan. As for the Sonata No. 3, it finds its source in post-Impressionism and is a very complex and demanding work both technically and musically. These pieces were all written during the First World War and are considered not only three of his finest works, but also his greatest contribution to the piano repertoire.

 

Piotr Anderszewski is one of the most charismatic pianists of his generation, and has an exclusive contract with Virgin Classics. This recording was made in Warsaw in December 2004.

 

In a recital this evening, Piotr Anderszewski concludes the Wigmore Hall's survey of Karol Szymanowski's music with a programme including the Métopes (1915), Masques (1915-16) and Third Piano Sonata (1917) that he has also recorded for this outstanding disc. Anderszewski's playing reveals the glories of Szymanowski's piano music like no other. He has never been one to rush into things, and these interpretations speak of lengthy deliberation about the composer's musical language and the ways of assimilating and conveying it.
Anderszewski himself has Polish blood, but it would be simplistic to suggest that this alone gives him the key to the composer's soul. As all the music here shows, there were overlapping and interleaving musical forces at work on Szymanowski.
By the time he came to write Métopes in 1915, he had shaken off the early influence of Richard Strauss, and his idiom has more in common with the impressionism of Debussy and the heady, perfumed, hedonistic world of late Skryabin.
Pianistic colour is paramount in these pieces, but, as Anderszewski so dynamically shows, atmosphere goes hand in hand with animated texture and a volatility of temperament that give the music a flavour - sometimes pungent, sometimes delicate and elusive - that is all its own.

Geoffrey Norris, Telegraph

 

After a quite wonderful wave of releases of music by Szymanowski (above all from Rattle and the CBSO), Piotr Anderszewski does his fellow Pole justice with this haunting collection. Szymanowski's music has a perfumed, exotic appeal that seems magically to flow from this superb pianist's fingers. 'Nausicaa', the third of the Greek-inspired Metopes introduces a lively spirit of the dance into the generally dreamy mood of its predecessors.
Gramophone

 

This disc reached me late, but it is too good to overlook. The Polish pianist reveals himself the foremost interpreter of his compatriot’s piano music in three works written between 1915 and 1917 in the cosmopolitan Szymanowski’s native Ukraine and in Russia. Influenced by the late, mystical piano music of Liszt, and the French impressionists Debussy and Ravel, and in thrall to the new-fangled rhythmic audacity of the recently notorious Stravinsky, the piano suites Métopes and Masques display a heady fusion of musical styles and extremes of sensory experimentation that makes Szymanowski’s finest music so personal. In Métopes, the erotic lure of the Mediterranean — and specifically of Homer’s Odyssey — is evoked in portraits of the Sirens, who attempt to seduce Odysseus with their song, and Calypso and Nausicaa, who delay the Greek hero’s return to Ithaca. In Masques, the oriental exoticism of Scheherazade and the ironic extroversion of Don Juan’s Serenade frame a Petrushka-like response to the Tristan story, Tantris le bouffon. In both of these pieces and a concise, technically demanding sonata, Anderszewski is a masterly advocate for difficult music that repays repeated listening.

Times, Five stars

 

Virgin Classics 5457302