Eugeniusz Morawski

[petershott@btinternet.com]

One of my great regrets is that most of us know so little of the 'Young Polish' composers who flourished in the first part of the 20th century. In many cases this is on account of the scarcity of recordings. The number of recordings of, for example, Morawski, Fitelberg, Szeluto (plus the odd download) can almost be counted on one hand. In other cases, and Morawski forms an extreme case, the music is now irretrievably lost. The supreme composer of the period was, of course, Szymanowski, and, fortunately, his music (just about all of it, surely?) is extremely well represented on disc and often in some splendid recordings. The same is true of the small corpus of Karlowicz (and how well I remember being utterly astonished some 30 years ago when I first encountered Karlowicz - and in some rather inferior recordings and when Chandos had not even, so to speak, been conceived).

Yet one reads of a period in musical history that seems to have been astonishingly rich and especially active. My regret is that, independently, of the major figures above, the few available recordings can only give us the briefest and most limited glimpse of the music produced at the time. And of course the cultural devastation of Poland in WW2 obliterated much of this music such that so much of it cannot be grasped back from history. Tragic.

All these thoughts were reignited in me through encountering a newly released disc (on CD Accord) of three symphonic poems of Morawski. I was led to the disc by an almost offhand remark of Rob Barrett on MusicWeb in his review of the excellent Zelenski and Zarebski Hyperion disc. Just who was this Morawski, I wondered, and that led me to the present disc.

It contains the three symphonic poems 'Don Quichotte' (where the music is post-Straussian, but where, unlike Strauss's Don Quixote, Morawski does not attempt to portray the knight's deeds and exploits, but instead tries to "paint the soul" of the Knight of the Sorrowful Figure); 'Ulalume' and 'Nevermore' both inspired by Poe. Like Karlowicz both pieces express sorrow, melancholy, mournful yearning, lost love, eternal return and all the other late-romantic richly opulent apparatus. However where Karlowicz unleashes vast torrents of passionate orchestral sound, Morawski's employment of the orchestra seems to me more disciplined and to exhibit greater skill in orchestration, and thus is perhaps more subtle and powerful for it.

And for those who don't know him: Morawski was born in Warsaw in 1876, and attended Warsaw Conservatory where, like so many others, he was taught by Noskowski. In 1908 he was suspected of revolutionary activity and imprisoned. Having been released (the booklet notes tell us as the result of a substantial bribe which cost Morawski's father much of the family estate) he fled to Paris where he lived until 1930. (And think of what was happening in music in Paris between 1908-1930). Morawski then returned to Warsaw to take up a teaching position - but of course was then caught in a situation where the spectre of Nazism hovered over Poland. When Poland was overrun by the Nazis all educational institutions were forcibly shut down, and Morawski became part of a pedagogical underground. He lived on in Warsaw throughout the uprising, but most of his music was destroyed forever when his home in the centre of the city was razed to the ground. He survives the war, but exists in a twilight, dreadfully impoverished, until a fatal stroke in 1948.

The lost works, according to the booklet, included 5 operas, 2 ballets, 3 oratorios, 3 symphonies, 3 concertos, a number of symphonic poems, 6 string quartets and a quantity of instrumental music. Think of it: that quantity of music gone up in smoke or flattened by the instruments of war. On the basis of the present 3 symphonic poems I would guess that this lost music was of the highest quality, and I won't attempt to persuade anyone of the tragic awfulness of that.

I blather on at length, and maybe most have given up earlier in the post! However this music is for me a very significant discovery, and I try to twist the arm of others into acquiring the CD by saying that it is one of the best produced CDs I've come across recently. The booklet notes, in particular, are substantial, greatly interesting, and quite free of CPO style gobbledygook.

[Mark Thomas]

where Karlowicz unleashes vast torrents of passionate orchestral sound, Morawski's employment of the orchestra seems to me more disciplined and to exhibit greater skill in orchestration, and thus is perhaps more subtle and powerful for it.

Spot on, Peter. I have had this recording for a few months and have very much enjoyed these three works. They are all powerful, rather dark, pieces which, to my ears at least, belong to that singular category of compositions which I remember not for their melodic content (I still can't bring any theme from them to mind), but for the atmosphere which the composer creates. It's almost film-noir in its intensity.