Roman Palester (1907–1989) was a man of great erudition, well-versed in the literature and art of his day, as is evidenced, for example, by his regular programmes for Radio Free Europe. The radio station, where he worked as head of the culture department for twenty years (1952–1972), provided him with a substitute of home. It made him feel closer to Poland and its affairs – since announcing his decision to emigrate in 1950, he had been a persona non grata in his homeland, banned as a man and as an artist. This is why his music is still so little known – it has not been performed for years and in many cases has not been published either. And yet it is very much worth exploring and incorporating into the canon of Polish 20th-century culture, as is evidenced by the present recording. The three substantial vocal-instrumental works by Roman Palester included in it – Kolacze [The Wedding Cake] to words by Szymon Szymonowic, Trzy wiersze Czeslawa Milosza [Three Poems by Czeslaw Milosz] and Listy do Matki [Letters to the Mother] to words by Juliusz Slowacki – present various hues of the composer’s musical world. Written in different periods of his life – Kolacze in 1942, Three Poems by Czeslaw Milosz in 1973–1977, and Letters to the Mother towards the end of his life (1984–1987) – they perfectly convey the musical style close to the composer in each period, as well as the feelings and emotions he struggled with at the time.

The music scene of Paris during the reign of Louis XV could be defined as truly cosmopolitan. The change in aesthetic preferences were already observed in the works written as early as the 1700s, when French composers started to assimilate more and more willingly some elements of Italian style into their pieces. What strikes is the fact that concepts concerning the creation of a mixed style (les goûts rèunis) were primarily developed by instrumental music composers. In contrast to opera, which was naturally connected with the morphology of the language and literature of a given country, compositions lacking the semantics of a text were more suitable for the creation of a universal musical language. The figure of Boismortier can be described as French Telemann. Similarly to his German counterpart, he favored the idea of a mixed style and experimented with unorthodox instrumentation solutions. Boismortier was also one of the first composers that did not have a wealthy patron or protector, living off his works solely. He owed that position to the royal prerogative (1724) to print and sell sheet music, which helped him to avoid the necessity of working as a teacher or seeking employment as an instrumentalist in one of numerous court ensembles. This new recording is the first complete album of Boismortier’s suites performed on the recorder solo.

Marek Raczynski belongs to the young generation of Polish composers and relates his artistic work mainly to choral music. He has composed many a cappella choral pieces which have entered the repertoire of many vocal ensembles all over the world. His artistic repository also includes vocal-instrumental pieces, instrumental forms and numerous arrangements. His initiation to the world of music Marek Raczynski owes to Prof. Stefan Stuligrosz, the conductor of “The Poznan Nightingales”, the boys’ and men’s choir in which Marek Raczynski sang for over a decade. Later, as a member of many choirs performing in Poland and Germany, he further developed his sense of music and knowledge of choral literature. Marek Raczynski graduated from the Frederic Chopin University of Music in Warsaw where he mastered his composing skills during a Post-Graduate Composition Course in the class of Prof. Pawel Lukaszewski. Additionally, Raczynski also graduated from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan where he studied psychology. Marek Raczynski does not limit himself to composing. He is a co-founder and member of “Minimus” Vocal Ensemble and, since 2015, he is a vice-president of the Chamber Music Promotion Association, “Musica Minima”. Marek Raczynski’s pieces have won many prizes at composing competitions.

Ignacy Jan Paderewski is today commonly known as a great pianist, a statesman to whom great credit is due for Poland’s regained independence, and a composer. However, Paderewski’s pianistic career began in an unusual manner and relatively late. After graduating from the Warsaw Institute of Music in 1878, the famous pianist spent ten years teaching, composing and honing his pianistic skills, only giving concerts from time to time. His real career began only in 1888. Before that happened, Paderewski was involved in various forms of music-making (during his student days, he even played trombone in an orchestra). He often engaged in chamber music. Together with friends from his student days, he founded a piano trio with which he concertized all over Russia (which resulted in the overly entrepreneurial students’ expulsion from the Institute). His first composition for violin and piano comes from 1878 – when Paderewski had just finished his musical studies. This work was entitled Song, and was published among other compositions dedicated to Ignacy Kraszewski for the 50th jubilee of his artistic career. It is a typical salon miniature. At that time, Paderewski wrote this type of works mainly for the piano; but in 1882, he wrote Romance for violinist Wladyslaw Górski, with whom he often concertized at the time. The present release features not only this work, but all of the composer’s violin and piano pieces, performed by Slawomir Tomasik and Robert Morawski.

Four composers, four fates. The stories of the four composers and their work are exemplary for the fate of Polish music in the first half of the 20th century, exemplary for a promising new beginning after the First World War following 123 years of political and cultural oppression and foreign domination by the Russian, Prussian and Austrian empires, exemplary for the unimaginable suffering and indescribable destruction that befell Poland with the Nazi terror on 1 September 1939, exemplary, however, also for the tremendous vigor and vitality that is so typical of Polish music as an expression of an indomitable will to live and survive. The biographies of Szymon Laks (1901-1983), Aleksander Tansman (1897-1986) and Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) also confront us with questions about the "identity" of music, about the perspectives of cultural historiography, about the mechanisms of repression, forgetting and rediscovery. Even though we are dealing with composers who never questioned their Polish identity, the centrifugal forces that affected their biographies through persecution, expulsion and exile were so strong that their national "adhesion" was lost. For decades, they found themselves in a kind of limbo from which only a transnational perspective on cultural history could free them. The fate of Ludomir Rozycki (1883-1953) was just as difficult. In 1904 he left Poland for Berlin to perfect his craft with Engelbert Humperdinck at the Royal Academy. During the 19th century and even at the beginning of the 20th century, Polish music was overshadowed by the Russian and, above all, the German "schools". For decades, training at a German academy was a must, with the Berlin institutions being of particular importance. Stanislaw Moniuszko studied at the Berlin Academy of Arts, Mieczyslaw Karlowicz at the New Academy of Music, and Zygmunt Noskowski, Feliks Nowowiejski and Ignacy Jan Paderewski at the Stern Conservatory. In 1906 in Berlin, Rozycki together with Karol Szymanowski, Apolinary Szeluto and Grzegorz Fitelberg - all of whom were students of Noskowski - founded the Spolka Nakladowa Mlodych Kompozytorow Polskich (Publishing Society of Young Polish Composers) with the aim of promoting contemporary, progressive Polish music, which was having a difficult time at home, and publicising it with editions and concerts. Rozycki enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, even beyond Poland's borders. He made substantial contributions to Polish symphonic poems with 'Stanczyk', 'Anhelli' and 'Boleslaw Smialy', and to Polish opera with 'Amor and Psyche', 'Casanova', 'Medusa' and 'Beatrix Cenci'. His ballet 'Pan Twardowski' (a Polish version of the Faust story), which premiered in 1921, was the most popular Polish ballet of the interwar period, with over 500 performances in Warsaw alone until 1939. Rozycki, who also played a central role in Polish musical life as a teacher with professorships in Lviv, Warsaw and Katowice, survived the Second World War in Warsaw, where he was active as a pianist in underground concerts. When the capital was destroyed by the German Wehrmacht in 1944, some of his previously unpublished works fell victim to the flames. 'Sonata for cello and piano' op. 10, written in Berlin in 1906, is Rozycki's first chamber music work. Alongside Zygmunt Stojowski's virtuosically expansive Sonata for cello and piano, premiered a few years earlier, it is one of the first contributions to the genre by Polish composers after Fryderyk Chopin's work written in 1847. Rozycki dedicated it to the cellist Konstanty Sarnecki, with whom he premiered the work. The three-movement work is surprising in many respects. On the surface, it appears to follow an ad aspera ad astra dramaturgy. On closer inspection, however, the relationship between the dark and light aspects proves to be extremely ambivalent in a fascinating way. The tumultuous opening with virtuoso arpeggios and urging appoggiaturas in the piano transports us to a dramatic, ominous night scene. However, the catastrophic climax is already reached in the final group of the 1st theme, a wild outburst in triple