Lukasz

A hundred years ago it was absolutely the greatest hit everywhere in Europe – the oratorio Quo Vadis by Feliks Nowowiejski, based on Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel of the same name and magnificently scored for soloists, mixed chorus, organ, and orchestra. We at cpo are now releasing this gigantic work in an interpretation by the Poznan Philharmonic under the conductor Lukasz Borowicz and with outstanding soloists and the Chorus of the Podlasie Opera and Philharmonic of Bialystok. Nowowiejski composed his oratorio in 1903, and during the following thirty years it was performed more than two hundred times throughout Europe and in North and South America – not least because its literary source, Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel with this title, was very well known.

“The album title ADELA comes from a song by Rodrigo which constitutes the emotional culmination of our duo’s programme. What counts is not the name, but the person we love and long for. Everyone certainly has such a person, and so we hope that each listener will find something close to his or her heart on our album.

The music of Michal Spisak was much more recognizable and available to a wide audience during the composers lifetime than nowadays. This album contains three compositions of this artist: the Piano Sui t e (a piece with a transparent texture in which Spisak clearly refers to the Baroque tradition), Sonata for violin and piano (for a change, very rich, diverse texture, full of violin dyad passages, varied in terms of harmony and sound colour) and Concerto for two pianos (very spectacular work, extremely diverse, as far as the sound is concerned; highly demanding for the pianists). The aforementioned pieces are a cross-section of the compositional techniques typical of Michl Spisaks musical language; they also introduce a whole range of neoclassical features confirming the composers stylistic affiliation.

This 59th volume of the Romantic Piano Concerto series features Jonathan Plowright, whose brilliant and utterly idiomatic performances of Romantic Polish piano music have confirmed him as a master of this repertoire. Here he collaborates with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Lukasz Borowicz to perform three very obscure but fascinating works. The music of Zelenski has already been championed by Plowright in a disc of Polish chamber music; now he performs his Piano Concerto in E flat major, which was written in 1903 and dedicated to the young Ignacy Friedman, who gave the premiere the following year.