Karolina Skrzynska

A cloudy sky and raindrops beating on the window: this itself is practically music, and for centuries, the sound of rain from the clouds has inspired not only painters but also poets and composers. On her debut GENUIN release, violist Karolina Errera and her piano partner Lilit Grigoryan present a selection of highly emotional music from John Dowland to Benjamin Britten. The prizewinner of numerous international competitions has placed a wide range of original works and arrangements on the program of this album – moving works that are best suited by both the warm sound of viola and piano, as well as the playing culture of the two interpreters!

This album contains three works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, two of which can be considered among the most popular in the history of music. The version of the Sinfonia concertante in E-flat Major KV 364/320d with the participation of the cello, presented on the album as the first item, sheds new light on this outstanding showcase of the Classical era, which makes it possible to look at the numerous melodic and contrapuntal relationships of the soloists from a new, refreshed perspective. The Duo in G Major for violin and viola KV 423, in which the parts of both instrumentalists can be considered almost equal, is entirely characterized by considerable rhythmic freedom, influencing expression and rhythm in the outer parts and the fluency of narration in the middle one.

The choral music of Richard Lambert, born in Bath in the English West Country in 1951, covers a wide range of expression, ranging on this album from straightforward SATB settings for church performance to a sardonic parody of the excesses of established religion. It also encompasses the timeless and the timely, with a number of contributions to the age-old tradition of Christmas music to a cantata inspired by the Covid pandemic.

This album is a monographic documentation of the output of one of the world’s greatest composers of the 20th and 21st centuries. The works presented on the album were created in close cooperation of composer Marcin Błażewicz (born 1953) with an excellent Polish duo, co-created by Karolina Mikołajczyk (violin) and Iwo Jedynecki (accordion). Both the Sonata for Violin and Accordion and the Double Concerto for Violin, Accordion and Orchestra are saturated with extraordinary emotionality and dramaturgy as well as with the expression and structure of sonic tensions typical of the composer’s style. The presented album is also the first containing works of Marcin Błażewicz, released a few months after the composer’s death.

The award-winning Silesian quartet present a new album featuring two composers from Warsaw – Joachim Mendelson and Grażnya Bacewicz. After completing his music studies in Warsaw and Berlin, Joachim Mendelson moved to Paris in 1929, where he joined the Association des Jeunes Musiciens Polonais, a society founded in 1926 to facilitate the study, publication, and promotion of the works of young Polish composers. Bacewicz also received support from the Association, and from Paderewski, and studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. The associations’ aims included re-establishing a national musical life at the highest level back in Poland (after more than a century of joint occupation by Russia, Prussia, and Austria), and both composers returned to Warsaw and worked there until 1939.