This release is the debut album of an extremely talented young violinist, presenting a handful of miniatures of classical music arranged by Tomasz Radziwonowicz for violin, with the accompaniment of string orchestra. Gabriela Balcerek began learning to play the violin at the age of 7 at Krzysztof Komeda-Trzcinski Music School in Ostrów Wielkopolski under the supervision of Agata Falkiewicz, MA. Currently, she is a student of the Poznan Mieczyslaw Karlowicz General Education Secondary Music School, where she develops her talent under the direction of Karina Gidaszewska. From an early age, she has been participating in many violin competitions. In total, she is a laureate of more than forty Polish and international violin competitions.

This album is a wonderful showcase of over forty years of activity of the Witold Lutoslawski Chamber Philharmonic. The albums programme shows the repertoire versatility of a chamber orchestra (from Baroque to contemporary music). Thus, we are dealing with a kaleidoscope of various compositional styles, which allows us to appreciate the ensembles multifaceted capabilities. The Witold Lutoslawski Chamber Philharmonic in Lomza was established in 1977 as the Lomza Chamber Orchestra. During its 40 years of existence, it has given almost two thousand concerts in Poland and abroad. It has received a number of awards for its activity and contribution to the development of musical culture, including the Podlasie Brand of the Year 2018 and Lomza Business Angel 2019.

The turn of the 19th century was a time of significant aesthetic changes in the European music. The tightened relationship between expression and expressive dynamics marginalized the instruments that did not offer the performer the possibility of making smooth dynamic changes, as a result of which they also fell from the composers’ grace. In the aforementioned phenomenon, we find an explanation for both the spectacular fall of the harpsichord, superseded by the significantly more ‘emotional’ piano, as well as the dethronement of the organ– the so far unquestioned ‘king of instruments.’ However, before falling into oblivion, the organ was saved by its centuries-old presence in Christian temples, where organ music accompanied the rituals, regardless of aesthetic revolutions. The unequivocally defined style of the instrument significantly influenced the choice of the recorded repertoire, which, apart from the works of German romantics, only includes pieces growing out of the aesthetic trunk they created. It is no coincidence that the output of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–1847) plays a dominant role, as to a large extent it is to him that the organ owns its 19th--century renaissance.

Starting in the second half of the 18th century, keyboard (especially piano) music was a peculiar area of artistic work developed mainly for the purpose of music-making in bourgeois homes. An important part of this repertoire is comprised of transcriptions intended originally for larger ensembles; thus, the texture of works for four hands is closer to that of compositions for orchestra than for piano. The fact that the works were performed in a home environment or in a situation of master-student contact also assumes a certain intimacy manifest in the frequent crossing of the left hand of the performer playing the primo part and the right hand of the performer playing the secondo part. The aforementioned two elements are quite visible in the first masterpieces of the genre: the sonatas written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for himself and his sister Nannerl. De facto, the later 19th-cen-tury literature for four hands follows in considerable measure the trail blazed by Mozart. Of course, in many works, there is also no lack of virtuosic elements. The expansion of the piano keyboard range was also conducive to systematic and complete exploration of the freshly-gained areas of the instrument’s range. The broad four-hands texture represents a superb field for this type of procedures, as is quite visible, for example, in one of Ferdinand Ries’ polonaises. The present album presents a stylistically diverse selection of works composed in the first half of the 19th century, selected to display as fully as possible the capabilities of the piano built between 1845 and 1847 by the Traugott Berndt company, an instrument whose sound characteristics are eminently appropriate to the works being performed, despite its being of later date relative to these works.

Thomas Prat started playing the piano at the age of six but it was his discovery of Chopin’s works a few years later that revealed his passion for music. He studied with Jean Marie Cottet at the Conservatoire National de Région de Paris, and has studied with Eric Vidonne pupil of Alicia de Larrocha at École Normale de Musique de Paris. He also benefited from precious advice during his pianistic journey with Anne Quéffelec and Eugen Indjic. Moreover, his appetite for science led him to become an engineer and specialize in applied mathematics at École Centrale Paris.He has performed in France at Salle Cortot, at Reid Hall, at Radio France studio 104, at the Festival de Louviers, at the Festival “Les Amateurs Virtuoses!”, at the “Flâneries Musicales de Reims” as well as at the “Nohant Festival Cho-pin”. He has also performed abroad, at Gasteig in Munich, at Łazienki Park in Warsaw, at the church in Brochów (where Chopin was baptized), in Shanghai and Milan. In 2018 he won First Prize at the Fourth International Fryderyk Chopin Competition for Amateur Pianists in Warsaw organized by the Fryderyk Chopin Society. Amateur competition participants do not work as concert pianists or piano teachers to earn money. They play the piano for the sheer love of music, independently of their professional careers. Present-day amateurs take us back to the time of Chopin (1810–1849), his pupils and his art.

Ewa FABIAŃSKA-JELIŃSKA is one of the most active and recognized composers of her generation. Her oeuvre is regularly presented at national and international music festivals and appreciated by music authorities, which is confirmed by numerous awards she has received in prestigious composers’ competitions. The creative output of Fabiańska-Jelińska, despite her young age, includes over a hundred compositions (excluding incidental music and arrangements), written for diverse ensembles, and is constantly expanding. In her work, we can find pieces representing various genres, including songs, solo concertos, symphonic works, while nearly half of them are written for one to four instruments. The present album features compositions created in the years 2015–2019, most of which represent a sui generis specialization of Fabiańska-Jelińska in the genre of instrumental chamber music, including instrumental duos and quartets. The album is complemented with four songs for solo instruments. Together, the compositions constitute a showcase of Fabiańska-Jelińska’s musical language; its indicators include high formal discipline and attention to material coherence, important role of tone color and melody in shaping expression, often marked by the presence of lyrical element, and frequent use of viola and trombone.

Józef Antoni Franciszek Elsner was a composer, music teacher, and music theoretician, active mainly in Warsaw. He was one of the first composers in Poland to weave elements of folk music into his works. Elsner composed many symphonic, chamber, solo, and vocal-instrumental works, and works for the stage, including over 100 religious works (masses, offertorios, oratorios, cantatas), eight symphonies, three concertos, three ballets, and thirty-eight operas. He is perhaps best known as the principal piano teacher of the young composer Frédéric Chopin. This new release showcases his chamber music, beautifully performed by a lineup of brilliant Polish musicians.

Lucia Dlugoszewski (June 16, 1925 – April 11, 2000) was a Polish-American composer, poet, choreographer, performer, and inventor. She created over a hundred musical instruments, including the timbre piano, a sort of prepared piano in which hammers and keys were replaced with bows and plectra. Dlugoszewski's compositions have been recorded for Nonesuch Records, Folkways, CRI, and other important contemporary music labels. Her 1975 piece Abyss and Caress, for trumpet and small orchestra, was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premièred by Pierre Boulez. In 1977, she became the first woman to win the Koussevitzky International Recording Award with Fire Fragile Flight, for 17 instruments – the work became a signature piece for the Philadelphia ensemble Orchestra of Our Time. The recordings for Nonesuch and CRI released in the 70s were reissued by CRI in 2002 as Disparate Stairway Radical Other along with new work for string quartet and timbre piano.

Marek Polanski's album is the world phonographic premiere of the first Polish violin caprices by August Fryderyk Duranowski and Joachim Kaczkowski. The recording was made on the 185th death anniversary of August Fryderyk Duranowski as well as on the 230th birthday and 190th death anniversary of Joachim Kaczkowski. Its premiere falls on the 250th birthday anniversary of August Fryderyk Duranowski in 2020. All these anniversaries are a great opportunity to familiarize music lovers around the world with the works of these two composers, now almost completely forgotten.

Voytek SOKO SOKOLNICKI is an independent artist. Opera singer, soloist of many opera houses, philharmonics, and concert stages in Poland and abroad, e.g. in Italy, USA, Canada, Thailand, or Germany. He has education in music (the Ignacy Jan Paderewski Academy of Music in Poznań) and visual arts (the Władysław Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź); he is keen on the synthesis of arts, i.e. he deve-lops concerts and performances combining sound, image, and movement. The artist has won a number of prestigious music awards such as the Jan Kiepura Theatrical Music Award in the category Best Operatic Debut awarded by the Mazowiecki Musical Theatre in Warsaw (2010) or the 1st prize in the 15th Grand Tenor Tournament at the Castle Opera in Szczecin (2013); he is also the winner of the Platinum Rose in the 3rd Battle of Tenors for Roses in Warsaw, organized by the Warsaw Chamber Opera (2016). He is one of the soloists of the Tre Voci crossover ensemble with whom they are very successful on international and Polish concert stages; the Onet Plejada web portal hailed them as the greatest opera discovery of 2017. In recent years, he has recorded three albums: with vocal lyrics, i.e. songs by various composers entitled Neb-bie with great pianist Michał Francuz; the album Sokolniccy Duett with Agnieszka Sokolnicka, a soprano endowed with a mesmerizing voice, and the album With Love with the Tre Voci ensemble. He initiates a number of charity concerts. His work is characterized by an innovative approach to art and openness to the audience, and his main goal as an artist is to serve people through art.

Nowadays, the work of François Couperin is commonly associated with harpsichord music of the turn of the Baroque and Classicism. His elaborate miniatures and suites, plenty of brilliant ornaments, are now almost inextricably linked to the canonical harpsichord repertoire. The album by Dorota Cybulska-Amsler makes us aware, however, that François was not the only composer in the Couperin family. As the artist points out, names of members of the Couperin family, originating from the Chaumes-en-Brie region, are already in documents from the 16th century. In 1586, Mathurin Couperin (ca. 1569–ca. 1640), is still making a living mainly from farming, but he obtains the right to practice music for remuneration. His son, Charles I (1595–1654) is going to be the founder of a musical dynasty.

This is already our third encounter with the great Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin – an encounter, in fact, that is as unusual as his music, which has delighted people around the world for over one hundred and fifty years. In Fryderyk’s day, not everybody was able to listen to his works. To hear one of his concerts they would have had to travel to where he lived – in his early years that meant going to Warsaw, and later even further, i.e. to Paris. Today, all we have to do is listen to one of his albums and imagine that the genius composer is playing especially for us.

Nowadays, the oeuvre of Polish composers active in the 19th century can be considered one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of our national music. In recent years, works of many of them have experienced a well-deserved renaissance, which is reflected in their increasingly marked presence in concert halls and among album releases. This is a direct result of intense research activity of musicologists as well as of the considerable interest and growing awareness of performers, who are more and more keen to include these pieces in their repertoires. This release is a collection of chamber music by Jozef Nowakowski and Fryderyk Chopin, performed beautifully by the Warsaw String Ensemble.

The traditional adage of popularizing a phenomenon, trend or style is that "it has gone under thatched roofs." In the case of Fryderyk Chopin's Mazurkas, however, the opposite was true - folk music found its way to the salons from under thatched roofs. The most famous Polish pianist met her during the holidays, which he spent in his friends' country estates, participating in various ceremonies, harvest festivals, singing and dancing evenings in taverns. Dashing mazurkas, gloomy kujawiaks, fast obereks from the regions of Mazovia and Kujawy became the inspiration for sophisticated stylizations created throughout Chopin's life and entered the canon of the world piano repertoire. Less than a century later, Karol Szymanowski, the precursor of the Polish musical avant-garde, entered into a dialogue with the folk tradition and in the years 1924-26 he composed his own mazurkas, so different from Chopin's. From under thatched roofs to salons, to concert halls and phonographic studios - you are facing another link in the chain of interpreting Polish folk music.

Chopin himself treated most of his vocal miniatures as pieces intended to bring joy, lighten faces or squeeze a tear from the eye. He belonged to people of a cheerful nature – merry; and in the exile, he would still joke and make “various facetiae.” This is the interpretation of these gems, presented in this album by Henryka Januszewska. It is witty, full of details and showcases an extraordinary culture. This recording of Chopin’s songs from 1988 belongs to the absolutely best and most interesting in the history of phonography. Henryka Januszewska is one of the outstanding Polish singers of the New Generation. She is a graduate of the State Music Academy in Katowice, in the class of professor Helena Lazarska. In 1975 she became a laureate of the 13th International Competition of Contemporary Music Performers in Rotterdam. Marek Drewnowski is an excellent soloist who also performs chamber music with great taste and understanding. He studied at the Warsaw Academy of Music. His repertoire includes baroque, classical, and romantic literature.