Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensemble: Glass Duo. Soloists: Anna Szafraniec, Arkadiusz Szafraniec.

The album is the world premiere recording of one section of the Concert featuring theatre and film music by Andrzej Zarycki on his 80th birthday. The event took place on 12 December 2021 at the ICE Cracow Congress Centre. During that evening, compositions written for theatre and film could be heard, from Green Goose and Macbeth to Provincial Actors and Hanka. Creator of great songs interpreted by Ewa Demarczyk or Zbigniew Wodecki, co-creator of the success of the Cellar under the Rams but also composer of symphonic, oratorio, theatre and film music celebrated his 80th birthday in Cracow. This extraordinary concert was performed by soloists (Adrianna Bujak-Cyran, Beata Czernecka, Magdalena Drozd, Piotr Kutnik, Beata Paluch, Tadeusz Kwinta, Julia Zarycka, Wiktoria Zawistowska, Jakub Zuckerman) and the Beethoven Academy Orchestra conducted by Rafal Jacek Delekta. The concert and the album are an initiative of the Cracow Cultural Forum, which documents music created for Polish stages and film productions under the project 'The Musical Trace of Cracow'.

Władysław Żeleński belongs to the group of our most outstanding 19th-century composers, since he is being put on a par with Fryderyk Chopin and Stanisław Moniuszko. The recordings presented on the present album were made on an 1890 Broadwood historical piano from the time of Żeleński from the collection of Mr Andrzej Włodarczyk, while archival sound recordings from the beginning of the 20th century became the vocal model for the performance of the songs, in which the stylistic features of the 19th-century singing survived.

The Cracow Harp Quintet was founded in 2019; it consists of an unusual set of instruments: flute, harp, and a string trio. As the only such professional chamber ensemble in Poland, it promotes music that has been forgotten or has not been published yet. Thanks to the joint initiative, the members of the ensemble share many years of experience of concerts, festivals, and competitions in Poland and abroad. The album Hommage is a tribute to the output of the composers associated with the Quintette Instrumental de Paris – a formation whose 100th anniversary of the foundation falls this year. The album will feature compositions by artists who were closely related to the ensemble, such as Jean Absil, Jacques Pillois, Aleksan der Tansman, and Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur. The repertoire is distinguished by its diverse nature: French Impressionism, medieval monody motifs, fascination with East Asian culture as well as the 20th-century idiom of Polish music. The album will feature the world recording premiere of Jacques Pillois’s suite 5 Haïkaï and the Polish recording premiere of Sonatina da camera by Aleksander Tansman.

The album Musical Landscapes contains a carefully thought over and set together group of eight compositions. The latter are formative of a specific music journey that spreads out from north to south and from west to east. This journey integrates diversity and beauty of art experience: from musical subtleties through grandeur of sounds, up to Spanish guitar temperament, from raindrops to storms with hailstones, from corta figure to sonorism. The selected compositions are, on one part, the most prominent works of world music in new arrangements and, on the other, the rarely performed pieces that were originally composed for the four-guitar ensemble. The presented transcriptions, full of the four musicians’ creative solutions and conceptions make up a new repertoire characteristic of fairly individual and authorial traits. The keynote of the project is the landscape conceived of in variety of manners.

The impressively rich instrumental legacy of Georg Philipp Telemann, one of the most prominent German composers of the late Baroque era, was a complement to the main area of his activity, which was church and opera music. The composer found great satisfaction in running collegium musicum associations, popular in Germany. They were groups of people interested in making music together, most often recruited from the academic youth and the bourgeois ‘middle class.’ Telemann founded his first collegium in 1702 in Leipzig, where he studied law. At the same time, he significantly transformed the traditional status of such institutions, which so far had been aimed at making music in their own group. Telemann quickly made the collegium musicum an institution organizing more or less regular public concerts in municipal halls, cafes, merchant social clubs, and aca-demic auditoriums; the collegium musicum would also support church ensembles on more important occasions. Telemann continued his co-operation with student collegia throughout his compositional activity, also in Frankfurt and Hamburg, zealously creating new pieces for them. On the present release, the Altberg Ensemble presents a selection of Telemann’s Suites and Concertos.

Joanna Gutowska writes: “The album Kaija Saariaho – Works for Cello has been inspired by Saariaho’s extremely rich musical language, which significantly influenced my artistic development and inspired me to further exploration of colors. The album largely refers to my doctoral dissertation ‘Kaija Saariaho’s cello works as an example of new qualities of sound and expression,’ in which I focused on identifying the key factors that contributed to the development of her original musical language. It mainly focuses on the composer’s small instrumental works (Petals for cello and electronics [1988], Spins and Spells for solo cello [1996], Mirrors for cello and flute [1997], Neiges for eight cellos [1998], Sept Papillons for cello solo (2000), and Light and Matter for violin, piano and cello [2014]).”

This album is the Polish phonographic premiere of works by three outstanding contemporary composers: Gubaidulina, Liebermann and Proto. The album presented by the performers is the outcome of ten years of cooperation, quest for a common sound, discovering new areas in music, artistic trips and creative interpretations. In their activities, double bass player Marek Romanowski and pianist Hanna Holeksa are guided by their common will to popularize new repertoire for this seemingly unobvious instrumental combination, proving its enormous potential.

Three outstanding Polish composers of contemporary music, three stylistically similar but completely different compositions in terms of character and three instruments of similar origin but completely different sound and temperament. These are the main components of Harmonia Polonica Nova – the already second album of the Witold Lutoslawski Chamber Philharmonic in Lomza presenting the genre of the concerto in a contemporary approach of Polish artists. This time, the main roles are performed by the accordion, two positive organs and the harmonica, instruments very close to each other in terms of their origins and at the same time strongly different in terms of their tone color, possibilities and, above all, character. To a certain extent, all of them come from the organ and it is also the organ that contributed to the inception of this album, which only confirms the popular statement about the organ being ‘the king of instruments.’ Two of the three presented concertos are compositions originally written for organ and orchestra, and their history goes back over a dozen or so and more than twenty years, respectively.

Marek Szlezer, who is well known to the Polish audience, is highly appreciated for his interpretations of Fryderyk Chopin’s works. In 2015, on the occasion of the composer’s 205th birthday, he performed at the famous Carnegie Hall in New York. On a number of occasions, he has also been nominated for the most important music award in Poland, Fryderyk. In 2021, the pianist from Cracow expands his discography with another album with piano works by Karol Szymanowski. The nearly 80-minute release covers pieces written over ten years (1924–1934), although belonging to different periods in Szymanowski’s output.

"I treat the piano as an unremarkable instrument in a rich music collection. [...] On the one hand, I am excited by, e.g. The possibility of writing something like a piano concerto, and on the other hand, I do not actually believe that I would be able to open a new perspective and muster significant impulses from this wonderful three-legged animal and not state the obvious. However, there is something lighter [...] - a wink at that bulky instrument that generates emotions of the audience and suffering experiences of adolescents who practice scales and passages, since they are in love with music." The repertoire of this album includes a wide variety of Bargielski's works, ranging from miniatures to larger forms. All this allows listeners to experience a fascinating musical journey and learn about one of the greatest pages in the history of Polish contemporary music.

This release contains three series of songs by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Raul Koczalski and Karol Szymanowski, written to the poetry of European composers living at the turn of the 20th century: Catulle Mendès, Rainer Maria Rilke and Dmitri Davydov. The album with interpretations of songs by Polish composers falls on the tenth anniversary of the artistic cooperation between Stanis?aw Kierner (bass-baritone) and Micha? Rot (piano), who since 2010 have been jointly developing their passion and skills in the field of performing artistic songs. In 2015, their first album was released with a moving interpretation of the song cycle by Franciszek Schubert, Winterreise.