Shaw Szymanowski

The Concert Overture is a hugely gifted young composer's homage to Richard Strauss, and fully worthy of its model in impetuousness, rich sonority and close-woven polyphony. The Second Symphony is no less rich but more disciplined, with Reger's influence added to (and modifying) that of Strauss, and with Szymanowski's own high colouring, sinuous melody and tonal adventurousness now in their first maturity. The Infatuated Muezzin songs are a high point of his middle period, Debussian harmony and florid orientalising arabesques fusing to an aching voluptuousness, colour now applied with the refinement of a miniaturist.

These performances of Szymanowski's String Quartets and Webern's Langsamer Satz by Carmina Qt are hard to describe with words. The ensemble captures varying shade and light of Szymanowski's magical soundscape by vivid imagination and formidable technical refinement. There is a wondefully crafted performance of Langsamer Satz by Leipziger Qt (MDG), but this one surpasses it by the sheer beauty of tonal blend and the emotional depth and intensity. It doesn't surprise me that this disc received 1992 Gramophone Award in chamber music category and was nominated for Grammy award.

These performances of Szymanowski's String Quartets and Webern's Langsamer Satz by Carmina Qt are hard to describe with words. The ensemble captures varying shade and light of Szymanowski's magical soundscape by vivid imagination and formidable technical refinement. There is a wondefully crafted performance of Langsamer Satz by Leipziger Qt (MDG), but this one surpasses it by the sheer beauty of tonal blend and the emotional depth and intensity. It doesn't surprise me that this disc received 1992 Gramophone Award in chamber music category and was nominated for Grammy award.

French pianist Lucas Debargue began studying the piano seriously only as an adult, and he has made news with daring feats like appearing with an orchestra for the first time in the finals of the Tchaikovsky Competition. He's not so much an enfant terrible as a young pianist with an instinct for running counter to trends in a productive way, and those watching him may find this Sony Classical release a good place to start. Here he offers unusual interpretations of fairly common sonatas by Schubert, and an unusual work, the Piano Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 21, of Karol Szymanowski.

This is a beautiful album of Songs with Orchestra by Szymanowski. The Polish State Philharmonic Orchestra is skillfully deployed by Karol Stryja who is a passionate advocate for this music. There are nineteen songs. How lovely it would have been if there had been a translation of the words of the songs included in the package because it requires a bit of effort to discover how the music fits these words. Another thing that would have been helpful would have been for each song to occupy a track. There are 3 fragments from a Christian religious poem by Jan Kasprowicz on tracks 5 - 7.

We experience a meeting of two musical worlds in this recording with Franziska Pietsch and Detlev Eisinger: Karol Szymanowski's often experimental, highly original sounds (particularly in Mythes, Op. 30) are heard alongside the direct musical language of Franck's Romantic A major Violin Sonata.

This is a brilliant idea for a CD. Composed within a time-frame of 11 years (1917-28), at a similar geographical distance from the main cosmopolitan centres of music, and with similar stylistic overlaps between late Romanticism and modernism, these two pairs of quartets make for genuinely illuminating comparison.

This new release which is the third of a 5 volume series covering the complete Piano Works of Karol Szymanowski includes Four Studies for Piano Op. 4 & Piano Sonata No. 2 in A major Op. 21, and eight pieces from the Twenty Mazurkas for Piano Op. 50.

Kasper Holten’s production (The Royal Opera’s first) of Król Roger (King Roger) brought the opera back to the London stage after an absence of almost 40 years. Karol Szymanowski’s masterpiece powerfully presents the dilemmas of culture versus nature and man versus beast, and movingly depicts King Roger’s inner struggles as he moves from an impossible life of repressed desires to the other extreme, giving in to his own demons. Meanwhile, Roger’s people, seduced by the promises of the mysterious Shepherd, are drawn towards totalitarianism and repression. Antonio Pappano conducts Szymanowksi’s opulent and beautiful score, with a cast including Mariusz Kwiecień as Roger (one of the greatest interpreters of the role today), Saimir Pirgu as the Shepherd, and Georgia Jarman in her Royal Opera debut as Roger’s loving queen Roxana.