Karol Szymanowski
Orchestral Songs

*  Songs of a Fairy-tale Princess, op. 31
*  Harnasie, op. 55
*  Love Songs of Hafiz, op. 26

Iwona Sobotka, soprano
Katarina Karneus, mezzo
Timothy Robinson, tenor
City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus & Orchestra/Simon Rattle
EMI 3 64435 2 Total time: 65:15

Summary for the Busy Executive: Beautiful.

Karol Szymanowski, the great Polish composer after Chopin and before
Bacewicz and Lutoslawski, worked long and hard to find his true voice.
He began as a follower of Richard Strauss and then fell under the influence
of Impressionism.  Around the end of World War I, Stravinsky -- particularly
the Stravinsky of Petrushka -- changed his music profoundly.  Szymanowski,
following the Russian's example, began to absorb his native folklore in
order to fashion his own brand of Modernism.  The three periods don't
stand discretely apart.  There's plenty of blurring, particularly between
the second and third phases of Szymanowski's creative career.  Furthermore,
Szymanowski writes so masterfully, that he produces great work in all
three periods.  I admit to having the most problems with the Impressionist
pieces.  Almost all of them spring from an Oriental, hot-house exoticism
(especially the Third Symphony) that simply makes me cringe, but I have
to admit the craft and imagination that goes into them.

Two of the three works -- Songs of a Fairy-Tale Princess and Love
Songs of Hafiz -- typify Szymanowski's impressionist manner.  Up to
now, I couldn't stand them.  It turns out, however, that I've heard
less-than-stellar performances.  Rattle and his soloists turn these
works into things of searing beauty.  Both began life for piano and
voice.  Szymanowski orchestrated the complete Hafiz and three of the
original six Princess songs.  The Princess songs, to poems by the
composer's sister, typically speak of lonely, unrequited love.  The
narrator, usually alone at night, sings to the sky.  Each song begins
with a wordless roulade of notes, always expressing emotion so intense
that it bypasses speech.  I've heard the complete set in their original
piano incarnation, and the orchestrations lift them into a different
realm.  You can scarcely believe you hear the same music.  The Love Songs
of Hafiz, from a few years later, set Hans Bethge's translation of Persian
poetry.  Bethge had earlier caused a revolution in German poetry with
his translations from the Chinese, some of which formed the basis of
Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.  The drooping-lily languor of Hafiz (and
its counterpart, Love Songs of the Foolish Muezzin from, I believe, 1911)
drive me up the wall.  Again, however, the performers transform the work
into something more vigorous and emotionally direct.

The ballet Harnasie, from the final period, throws over the velvet traces
of the previous scores.  Even those who think of Polish music as Chopin
and his imitators might find the ballet a sudden slap in the face.  Based
on a kind of Lochinvar story, the ballet really provides an excuse to
dig deep into Polish folk music as an expression of both nationalism and
primitivism.  Stravinsky -- particularly the more raucous bits of Firebird
and Petrushka and to some extent Rite of Spring -- comes to mind more
than once, but overall the ballet makes a strongly individual impression.
Stamping rhythms alternate with long, yearning melodies intertwining
with one another, like folksingers who riff on one another's tunes.  In
the latter, one often gets the feeling of night, the elemental underpinning
of a Chopin nocturne.  Ironically (considering the conscious attempt to
express the Polish soul), the ballet never found a stage production in
Poland during the composer's lifetime.  Polish music may have been
dominated for too long by second-hand Chopins, aping the surface, rather
than the substance of that music.

The music fits Rattle down to the ground.  I've always considered
his strong suits drama and color.  I'm not so sure I'd like to hear his
Mozart or Brahms, but he certainly comes up a winner here.  The two song
cycles achieve ecstatic intensity, rather than drown a listener in the
usual heavy perfume.  Come to think of it, that may well be what Szymanowski
had in mind.  The Harnasie is all animal spirits, and "The Raid of the
Harnasie," the climax of the piece -- a glorious riot of brass, cymbal
crashes, and choir -- should lift you out of your socks.

Steve Schwartz

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