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.

The fourth and fifth albums of this Szymanowski’s complete solo piano works series. This release introduces piano music from all of three Szymanowskis style periods. Pianist Anu Vehviläinen (DMus) works as a university lecturer at the DocMus Doctoral School of the Sibelius Academy, the University of the Arts Helsinki. She teaches piano, supervises artistic doctoral students’ theses, runs courses and develops the artistic education at the doctoral level. Vehviläinen’s artistic interest has focussed on Karol Szymanowski’s piano music.

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.

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.

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.

Das SWR Vokalensemble gehört zu den besten Chören der Welt. Ein weiterer Baustein in der Serie mit Chorwerken aus verschiedenen Ländern. Sehr selten aufgeführte Werke von Szymanowski, Gorecki, Haubenstock-Ramati und Lutoslawski, den bedeutendsten polnischen Komponisten. Dass Polen besonders im 20. Jahrhundert so viele und so herausragende Komponisten hervorgebracht hat, ist angesichts der politischen Geschichte des Landes sehr überraschend. Nach dem 2. Weltkrieg und nach Stalins Tod brach sich auf dem Musikfestival 'Warschauer Herbst' 1956 die aufgestaute Kreativität Bahn und es präsentierte sich das ungeheure musikalische Potential des Landes einer erstaunten Weltöffentlichkeit.

Isabelle Faust is one of my favorite violinists. She puts her heart and soul into everything she plays. The unusual and varied set of works on this recording display her gifts to an almost sublime degree of excellence and execution. She knows how to "get into" the music and make it speak. I value this selection because of its variety and recommend it to anyone with a sense of adventure beyond the traditional norms, of which she is also quite able, as witnessed by this recording. She is, quite simply put, an outstanding talent and this recording shows her admirable abilities completely and well.

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.

“This is not at all what I wrote, but play it like this. Do play it this way!” exclaimed Dmitri Shostakovich after Yudina performed the freshly written 24 Preludes and Fugues. This exclamation contains the key to understanding of Maria Yudina’s performing art – a controversial and disputable one that left a profound imprint on the cultural environment of the twentieth century. The 10-album set is the biggest part of Maria Yudina’s surviving studio and concert recordings from the Melodiya archive made between 1948 and 1969.

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 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.