The many colleagues, donors and friends of the Polish Music Center were very generous this summer, when our Director Marek Zebrowski was travelling in Poland to retrieve PMC archival materials preserved by our partners at the National Archives/AGAD facility and accept a UNESCO designation for our Henryk Wars Collection at the Presidential Palace in Warsaw. Thanks to the abundance of gifts, we’ve divided the news of these gifts into two parts (see Part I regarding donated books here)
From Boosey & Hawkes and EDA Records
The PMC’s longtime friend, Frank Harders-Wuthenow at Boosey & Hawkes publishers in Berlin, for many years has dedicated great effort and resources to publishing and promoting music by Polish and Polish-Jewish composers. His latest project includes a new critical edition of works by Szymon Laks (1901-1983). The score we received from Mr. Harders-Wuthenow on this occasion is Laks’s Trois pièces de concert, a work from 1935 for cello and piano. With extensive and informative notes in German, French, English and Polish, this attractive presentation by Boosey, in cooperation with Bote & Bock publishers, should be very interesting to musicians worldwide who are willing to explore works by this Polish émigré composer and Holocaust survivor.
Mr. Harders-Wuthenow, a noted musicologist and the head of Promotion and Repertoire at Boosey & Hawkes, also presented the PMC with a carefully-researched booklet, Écoles de Paris—Paris pour école: Réflexions sur une notion d’école problématique as well as its twin in German: Écoles de Paris—Paris pour école: Gedanken zu einmen problematischen Schulbegriff. It examines the lively music scene in Paris in the 1930s, then widely accepted as the most important capital for new music. Focusing on such composers as Jacques Ibert, Marcel Mihalovici, and George Antheil, Mr. Harders also provides a chapter on Szymon Laks where he also touches upon Laks’s Polish compatriots who were active in Paris during the inter-war period, including Alfred Gradstein (1904-1954), Michał Kondracki (1902-1984), Feliks Łabuński (1892-1979), Piotr Perkowski (1901-1990), Bronisław Rutkowski (1898-1964), Aleksander Tansman (1897-1986), and Kazimierz Sikorski (1895-1986).
This pioneering research booklet has also been augmented by a CD recording (EDA Records 048) where, alongside works by Antheil, Ibert, Mihalovici, and Stravinsky, Laks’s 1963 Concerto da camera pour piano, instruments à vent et batterie is also featured. With the recording and the booklet, the public can better understand the phenomenon popularly referred to as the École de Paris from the point of view that many of the composers associated with this school were of Eastern European and/or Jewish descent. Both the CD and Mr. Harders-Wuthenow’s study mark the centenary of Stravinsky’s celebrated Octet for Winds as well as Antheil’s arrival in Paris in 1923. Both of these publications are highly recommended to anyone interested in music-making in Paris at that seminal time.
One more gift rounded out Mr. Harders-Wuthenow’s donation to the PMC on this occasion. It is a CD recording entitled Poland Abroad (EDA Records 039), featuring concertante works by Jerzy Fitelberg (1903-1951), Tadeusz Kassern (1904-1957), and Michał Spisak (1914-1965). All of these works were written during the 1940s. Spisak’s Concertino for String Orchestra, written in France in 1942, is the earliest. Kassern’s Concerto for String Orchestra was written only a year later, when the composer was in hiding in Nazi-occupied Poland. Fitelberg’s Concerto for Trombone, Piano and String Orchestra dates from 1948 and was written in America only a few years before the composer’s untimely passing.
As always, extensive and well-documented program notes in German, English and Polish by Frank Harders-Wuthenow greatly enrich the booklet accompanying this CD. All works on this CD represent world premiere recordings made by the Warsaw Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Krzysztof Słowiński, who also revised the Kassern score for this project. With a pioneering recording and a fascinating repertoire, this CD should be discovered by other soloists, conductors and ensembles as quickly as possible.
More CDs and Journals from SPMK
Thanks to another longtime friend of the PMC, pianist and professor of piano Grzegorz Mania, who also chairs Stowarzyszenie Polskich Muzyków Kameralistów [Polish Chamber Musicians’ Association, or SPMK], we received another issue of Notatnik pianistyczny covering the months of April—June 2024. As usual, this quarterly publication contains a variety of excellent information for pianists of all ages and abilities. The opening pages of this issue have practical information and tips on preparing selected works and/or movements from Mozart (Sonata KV 333), Schumann (Kinderszenen), and Chopin (Polonaise in G minor). Dr. Mania also interviewed pianist Ewa Pobłocka, and another pianist—Krzysztof Książek—gave a short interview about his life and career. Vladimir Horowitz’s famous 1986 recital in Moscow and the Deutsche Gramophon recording of this momentous event is discussed in an article by Ireneusz Boczek. A substantial amount of pages in each issue of the Notatnik is always devoted to new or little-known solo piano pieces and, on this occasion, we have the score of Marta Mołodyńska-Wheeler’s Prelude for the Left Hand, Agnieszka Kulikowska-Owsiad’s My First Swing, and Władysław Żeleński’s Idyll, expertly edited and fingered by Marek Szlezer—another concert pianist, a Kraków Academy of Music professor and Chair of Piano Studies, as well as a frequent contributor to this publication.
Another gift from Grzegorz Mania and SPMK is their latest CD recording on their in-house label, whose catalog has recently grown to almost forty titles. This CD (SPMK 038) features two large-scale works for solo piano by Robert Schumann, his youthful and virtuosic variation cycle Sinfonische Etüden, Op. 13 and the more introspective Waldszenen, Op. 82, interpreted on this recording by pianist Marek Zebrowski.
Messages String Quartet & Piotr Lato
From the Messages String Quartet, we received their latest CD recording dedicated to clarinet quintet repertoire (DUX 2061). Featuring guest artist and noted clarinet virtuoso, Piotr Lato, the Quartet (Małgorzata Wasiucionek-Potera, Oriana Masternak, Maria Shetty and Beata Urbanek-Kalinowska) presents works by Mieczysław Weinberg and Aleksander Tansman complemented by a work by Dariusz Przybylski, a contemporary composer who is also an organist and professor at the Chopin Music University in Warsaw.
On the Messages/Lato recording, Weinberg is represented by the more intimate version of his Chamber Symphony No. 4, Op. 153, scored by clarinet, string quartet and triangle, and dating from 1992, a few years before Weinberg’s death.
Aleksander Tansman’s Musique pour Clarinette en Si bemol et Quatuor à cordes is also a late work, completed in 1982, four years before Tansman’s death in Paris. Przybylski’s Eine kleine Morgenmusik is a work of the 22-year-old composer written in 2006, completed during the year when his music was recognized with prizes at numerous competitions for composers in Bydgoszcz, Łódź, Warsaw and Vienna. It was also the year that Przybylski was awarded as the Polish Ministry of Culture, Keimyoung Research Foundation, and Erasmus Socrates scholar.
As usual, with their probing musicianship and insightful interpretation that gives each of the composers their individual character and style, the Messages Quartet shines on this DUX release. Piotr Lato’s elegant virtuosity and great sensitivity to the nuances of working with the string ensemble gives a certain thumbs-up to this presentation.
The Brothers Radziwonowicz
The name Radziwonowicz may be familiar to our readers since Karol Radziwonowicz, a pianist and a dedicated pioneer of Paderewski’s oeuvre, has performed at the Paderewski Festival in Paso Robles on two occasions during the past thirty years and has been featured in countless recordings and concerts worldwide. On this occasion, in June in Warsaw, Karol presented the PMC with a CD recording of Requiem dla świata [Requiem for the World], composed by his older brother, Tomasz Radziwonowicz—a violinist, arranger, composer, conductor, founder of the I Solisti di Varsavia string quintet, and the Sinfonia Viva orchestra. Tomasz Radziwonowicz was also the first to arrange all of Fryderyk Chopin’s piano-and-orchestra works for piano and string quintet, and his works have been performed in many countries around the world.
His most recent work, Requiem for the World, is a full-scale composition scored for four soloists, choir and orchestra. On this PRCD 2397 recording carried out at the Polish Radio Lutosławski studio in 2021, the composer leads the orchestra and soloists, including soprano Anna Mikołajczyk-Niewiedział, mezzo-soprano Aneta Łukaszewicz, tenor Rafał Bartmiński, and bass-baritone Robert Gierlach. The soloists were joined by the Warsaw Academic and Artos Boys’ choirs.
From Maria Wieczorkiewicz
Finally, in this category of gifts, there are three items from Maria Wieczorkiewicz, a journalist from the Polish Radio. She presented the PMC with two CDs featuring contemporary Polish popular music. Both feature Daniel Gałązka—a singer and guitar player—with his band; the first is titled Dotykam dachów [Touching Roofs], the other DGZZ I Zobacz [DGZZ and See].
The other gift from Ms. Wieczorkiewicz is a boxed set of CDs featuring the so-called Trilogy by Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916), the 1905 laureate of the Nobel Prize for literature. By far one of Poland’s most popular writers, his works are still in print and form a staple of all school reading lists. Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy consists of three large-scale historical novels set in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the seventeenth century. They include Ogniem i mieczem [With Fire and Sword], Potop [Deluge], and Pan Wołodyjowski [Sir Michael]. Abroad Sienkiewicz is best known for Quo vadis, another epic novel set in Nero’s Rome. The first two novels of the Trilogy have been transferred to the big screen in Poland, as was Quo vadis, including the famous 1951 Hollywood adaptation with Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Leo Green and Peter Ustinov. Each of the Trilogy novels is read by a different actor and for the general public all represent a major listening effort with Deluge topping the chart at over 52 hours. For With Fire and Sword a 35-hour listening session is required, and Sir Michael at only 22 hours might seem almost brief by comparison with the two other literary behemoths. Certainly, this unique donation will be a special addition to the PMC’s sound library.