Szymanowski : Songs -Three Fragments from Poems by Jan Kasprowicz Op.5, Three Songs to Words by Dymitr Dawydow Op.32, etc (10/2007) / Anna Radziejewska(Ms), Mariusz Rutkowski(p)

Several recordings by Polish artists have begun to illuminate the songs of Karol Szymanowski, partially obscured outside of Poland by linguistic considerations. Consider the Four Songs to Words, Op. 41, by Rabindranath Tagore, recorded here: Szymanowski worked from a Polish translation of a German translation of Tagore's Bengali poetry, and one wonders about the relation of the final result to the original. This is nevertheless a fine survey of Szymanowski's large body of art song, touching on works from various stages of his career and furnished with enthusiastic and erudite (if awkwardly translated) liner notes indicating the place of each set in the composer's vocal output as a whole. While Szymanowski was clearly aware of artistic currents in Vienna and Berlin in the early years of the twentieth century, his music has an appealingly personal style that persists through a series of stylistic shifts. He reveals himself, in the songs here, as a superb melodist with an ability to weld music and text together, and the stylistic experiments tend to unfold behind and around compelling vocal lines and in the choice of texts themselves. Sample Labedz, Op. 4 (The Swan, track 7), an early work with a text drawing on a time-honored identification of the swan with death and a setting fitting firmly into late Romantic tradition; it nevertheless has a certain combination of mysticism and melodic lyricism that set it apart from models Szymanowski would have known. The combination persists through the composer's encounters with various poets, through expressionistic works, through the Tagore songs (which don't sound Indian or Eastern), and through the beautifully compact Seven Songs to Words by James Joyce, Op. 54, which are, like all the rest of the music, in Polish. Mezzo-soprano Anna Radziejewska and accompanist Mariusz Rutkowski deliver gorgeous performances with perfect control over a deep, meditative mood and over a trajectory that runs across these through-composed settings of stanzaic texts. The booklet includes Polish and English texts, as well as the German (but not the Bengali) texts for the Tagore songs. Strongly recommended to anyone with an interest in the early modern era.