Karol Szymanowski (1882 - 1937), 4 Etudes, Op.4 for solo piano (1900 - 1902)

Performed by Martin Roscoe

00:00 - No. 1 Allegro moderato (Eb minor)
03:30 - No. 2 Allegro molto (Gb major)
05:25 - No. 3 Andante (Bb minor)
09:52 - No. 4 Allegro (C major)

Karol Szymanowski’s life and career may be seen, from our vantage point, as a twofold quest in which the personal and the national ran in parallel, or, perhaps, were intertwined. On the one hand, he was engaged in a typically post-Romantic search for self-realization as an artist, working towards a full development of his individual musical aims and sensibilities; while on the other, he came more and more to seek an authentic compositional voice that could be heard (one way or another) as distinctively Polish, and also as distinctively modern. Yet his intensity and subjectivism went hand in hand with a strong desire for a certain kind of resolved clarity in the finished musical form—classical finish achieved by another route, perhaps, as an expression of modernity. His aesthetic stance, or let us say more soberly his musical practice as a composer, was eclectic in a stylistic and technical sense. But the subtle power of his invention and his personal mode of utterance were resilient and original enough to absorb and individualize (rather than merely appropriate) such a range of influences, and so turn them to his own advantage.

Szymanowski’s Four Études, Op 4, were composed between 1900 and 1902. Before his Warsaw studies Szymanowski had attended the music school of his father’s cousin, Gustav Neuhaus, at Elisavetgrad, in what is now Ukraine. He dedicated these pieces to Tala (Natalia) Neuhaus, a lifelong friend. The harmonic and melodic inflections of early Scriabin are especially noticeable in the first Étude, in E flat minor, though not the distilled, evanescent brevity also characteristic of him. The second Étude, in G flat major, simultaneously divides groups of six semiquavers into subsets of both two and three to create an Escher-like, dizzying sense of conflicting perceptions. The B flat minor third Étude, which in posterity has achieved some independent fame, presents a sorrowful cantilena above slow repeating chords, rising to an imposing climactic restatement of the principal idea before reaching a sombre but subdued conclusion. The last Étude of the group offers a tantalizing glimpse of a far more tangential approach to tonality, juxtaposing hints of C major and A flat minor at the outset and launching without preamble into a restless discourse marked by obsessive repetition of short melodic motifs against a backdrop of triplet quavers. Eventually the fires burn themselves out, however, and with final calm comes unequivocal affirmation of C major as the sovereign key.

(Hyperion)

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