The most beautiful song cycles of Polish vocal lyricism from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The distinguished baritone Mikolaj Zalasinski, endowed with a voice of Verdian richness and beauty, together with the acclaimed collaborative pianist Lukasz Debski, invites the listener into a world of melancholy, reflection, and poetic depth - a world that, despite the passage of time, remains strikingly immediate and profoundly moving. Here, late Romanticism gradually yields to emerging new harmonic and colouristic tendencies, while the musical fabric is woven from texts by William Shakespeare and leading poets of the Young Poland movement. The literary and musical refinement of these compositions, combined with interpretations of the highest calibre, form the defining virtues of this album.