Warsaw Music Salon
Józef ELSNER (1769-1854)
Piano Quartet in E-flat major, Op.15 (c.1805) [22:35]
Maria SZYMANOWSKA (1789-1831)
Fantaise in F major for piano (1819) [10:21]
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-1791)
Piano Quartet in G minor, K 478 (1785) [26:26]
Franciszek LESSEL (1780-1838)
Trio in E major, for piano, violin and cello, Op.5 (1806) [17:54]
Arte dei Suonatori Piano Quartet
rec. October 12-15, 2019, Concert Hall, Krzystof Penderecki European Centre for Music, Lusławice,.
CD ACCORD ACD269-2 [77:48]
The underlying concept of this album is to give some idea of the kind of music to be heard in the musical salons of Warsaw in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries. There is, so far as I know, no evidence that Mozart ever visited Warsaw. Nor that his Piano Quartet, K.478 was ever played in any such salon. But, as Jolanta Brózda–Wiśniewska writes in her booklet notes, “there are plenty of sources confirming that performances of music by Mozart often took place in the city during the nineteenth century”, so its inclusion is far from being unjustified. Given that K.478 is amongst the best of Mozart’s chamber works, it comes as no surprise to find that, in purely musical terms, it rather overshadows the three works by Polish composers with which it shares this disc; but that is not to say that those works are by any means of no interest. Indeed, all of them offer some real pleasures and all three of these relatively unfamiliar Polish composers are interesting figures.
Take, for example, Maria Szymanowska (née Marianna Agata Wołowska); her parents hosted one of the most significant of Warsaw’s musical salons – visited by, amongst others, Dussek, Mozart’s son Franz Xaver, Paer and Cherubini. Jozef Elsner, Franciszek Lessel and other Polish musicians frequently performed there too. Maria began serious piano lessons aged 8 and her evident talent was encouraged and nurtured by her parents. Before too long she was involved in the city’s various musical salons. In 1810 she visited Paris, where her playing was admired by Cherubini, who also dedicated a piano piece to her. On her return to Warsaw, in the same year, she married Józef Teofil Szymanowski, wealthy owner of an estate near Warsaw (thereafter she was normally referred to as Maria Szymanowska). In 1811 she gave birth to twins (a girl and a boy) and, in the following year, to a daughter, Celina, who was later (in 1834) to marry Adam Mickiewicz, one of Poland’s greatest poets and an important figure in European Romanticism. Insofar as being a mother allowed, she continued to give private recitals and to compose. However, music’s centrality in her life led to marital tensions, especially after she began, in 1817/18, to undertake European tours as a pianist and in 1820 the marriage ended, with Maria having custody of the children. Nevertheless, between 1818 and 1823 recital tours took her to many of Europe’s major cities, including Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Venice and St. Petersburg. She – she was both beautiful and charming – and her playing were much admired. She was one of the first piano virtuosos to play most of her recitals from memory. On one occasion when she did use a score it is recounted that John Field, when asked to turn the pages for her refused, on the grounds that her beauty would distract him from the task! Mendelssohn didn’t think as highly of her playing as many did and observed (more than a little meanly) that some seemed “to have confused her pretty face with her not-so-pretty playing”. No doubt finding the endless round of touring exhausting and wanting to spend more time with her growing children, she settled in St. Petersburg at some point in the 1820s (in 1822 she was given the title of ‘First Court Pianist to the Imperial Princesses Elizabeth and Maria of Russia’), giving recitals in the city’s royal and aristocratic palaces, composing, and teaching private students. Sadly, she died during an outbreak of cholera in 1831.
Szymanowska is represented here by her ‘Fantaisie in F major’ (first published in 1819), a substantial and technically demanding piece, played by Katarzyna Drogosz on a 2011 fortepiano by Robert Brown after an in instrument of Michael Rosenberger (c. 1805). Katarzyna Drogosz’s reading captures very well the contrasting tempi and moods of this striking pre-Romantic piece. In his Doctoral dissertation (Maria Szymanowska: Pianist and Composer, University of Connecticut, 2001), Slavomir Pawel Dobrzański observes that the Fantaisie presents many pianistic challenges, as Szymanowska “exploits such elements as frequent crossing of the hands, simultaneous arpeggiated chords in both hands in arrange if three octaves, frequent leaps, trills in intervals of thirds […] and chordal passages in fast tempo”. But for all the work’s hectic excitement and strong dramatic sense, one is tempted to agree, to some extent, with Dobrzański’s judgement that “The melodic element is, unfortunately, not sophisticated enough to hold the listener’s attention”. Still, listening to this performance by Katarzyna Drogosz has encouraged me to seek out more of Szymanowska’s work – with largely happy results. Where the ‘Fantaisie’ is concerned, Dobrzański says that in her book on the composer (Maria Szymanowska, Krakow, 1959), Maria Ivanejko sees it as related to the keyboard fantasies of C.P.E. Bach. Certainly, Szymanowska’s dramatically expressive ‘Fantaisie’ feels as though it belongs on a line running between the empfindsamer Stil of C.P.E. Bach on the one hand, and fully-fledged Romanticism on the other. It seems to me that in her ‘Fantaisie’, Szymanowska, can be heard reaching towards (but not quite finding) a new artistic vision that would fully ‘justify’ her virtuosity and its expression of both a strong sense of inner emotion and dramatic excitement.
Musically speaking, Joźef Elsner had a more thorough education and a wider range of experience than Szymanowska did. His music doesn’t look forward as much as some of hers does, but it is the work of a composer assured of and comfortable within his own idiom which, though it incorporates some Polish folk elements, is firmly grounded in Viennese classicism, with Mozart often being a recognizable influence in his music. Until some six or seven years ago, if someone had mentioned Elsner to me, I would have known the name only from biographies of Chopin, where he usually appears as one of Chopin’s composition teachers, who was wise enough to recognize his pupil’s great potential. Elsner was born in Grodków in Silesia. After attending primary school there (and singing in a church choir), his musical education (as a singer and a violinist) was furthered when, between 1781 and 1785 he was a student first at the school of the Dominican monastery in Wroclaw (Breslau) and then at the city’s Jesuit High School. In 1786 he began theological studies at the University of Wroclaw before deciding to study medicine instead. In 1789 he moved to Vienna intending to further his medical studies. While there he became seriously ill and, after his recovery, resolved to make music his career. In 1791 he obtained a post as a violinist at a theatre in Brno. In the following year he was appointed conductor at the Imperial Royal Theatre in Lviv (Lwów), a post he held until 1795; he was also much involved in other aspects of the city’s musical life, teaching and organizing an Academy of Music, the weekly concerts of which included works by Haydn and Mozart (as well as music by Elsner). In 1799 Elsner moved to Warsaw, where he was to be based for the rest of his life. He worked as a conductor, composer, critic and teacher; he also set up in business as a music publisher. He taught at several musical institutions in the city; while teaching at the new conservatory in the city, one of his students was the young Chopin; Elsner noted, on Chopin’s ‘report’, that the young man displayed “special aptitude [and] musical genius”. Elsner was very supportive of Chopin and, at a time when many teachers adhered rigidly to one system or another, he believed that “the best way of teaching was to let the individuality of a talented pupil assert itself” (Ruth Jordan, Nocturne: A Life of Chopin, 1938, p.206). When some of Elsner’s colleagues criticised unconventional features in Chopin’s work, Elsner told them, “Leave him alone. If he does not follow the traditional method it is because he has one of his own, and one day his work will reveal an originality the like of which has never been seen anywhere before” (ibid., p.55).
Elsner was a prolific composer, writing eight symphonies and almost forty operas, as well over a hundred sacred choral works. All I have heard of his work I owe to two recordings, Chamber Music, (DUX 155/56, 2020) and a 4-CD set also called Chamber Music (PROFIL PH 19033, 2019). Reviewing an album of Elsner’s orchestral music in 2007 (American Record Guide, 70:5) Carl Bauman began by announcing that Elsner was “an almost unknown Polish composer of great quality”. He is certainly better known by now – though hardly a household name even amongst music lovers. I don’t think I would use the word ‘great’ about Elsner’s music (though I have to say once more that I have only heard a small fraction of all that he wrote); he is an accomplished, highly competent composer who didn’t, so far as I can hear, create a voice of particular individuality. Listening to his Piano Quartet in E-flat major, Op.15, it is clear that Mozart was his exemplar, perhaps the Piano Quartet in E flat, K.493 as much, or more, than K.478 – the quartet also recorded on this disc. The opening movement of Elsner’s Quartet (marked ‘moderato’) is elegant, though it has a moderate kind of fire too. In its early bars the fortepiano and the strings are beautifully integrated, especially in this fine performance. The two collections of Elsner’s chamber music mentioned in the previous paragraph both contain alternative accounts of this quartet, but I find this new performance more persuasive – and it benefits from superior recorded sound. The quartet’s second movement (‘Romance: Andantino’) has a thoroughly ‘Viennese’ charm and some attractive melodies. It is, again, beautifully played. Elsner gives the cello some moments at the forefront of the music and in these Maciej Łukaszuk does full justice to Elsner’s writing. The closing movement (‘Rondo: Allegro assai’) has a very Mozartian air, especially in the keyboard writing, but there aren’t, I think, any direct borrowings. Elsner’s indebtedness to Mozart is not one of direct ‘imitation’ but rather that of a lesser composer who has learned general lessons from a greater one. (I should say that a musically literate friend who arrived to see me when this track was playing thought it was Mozart I was listening to!). Like the rest of the quartet which it brings to a conclusion, this is thoroughly enjoyable and engaging music, especially when performed as well as this.
It occurs to me that some readers may be a little puzzled by the identity of the performers on this disc, perhaps because they possess or have heard recordings – such as Vivaldi’s ‘La Stravaganza’, with Rachel Podger, (Channel Classics, 2003), Vivaldi’s Concertos for Strings (Alpha, 2010) or Telemann’s Ouvertures Pittoresques (BIS, 2013) made by the excellent baroque orchestra called Arte dei Suonatori, which was founded in 1993 by violinists Ewa Golińska (who plays on this new disc) and Aureliusz Goliński, and which remains very active still. This smaller ensemble seems to have grown out of the orchestra without being, as it were, a subdivision thereof. The booklet notes tell us simply that the orchestra’s “meeting with Katarzyna Drogosz has resulted in establishing a piano quartet from among the members of the orchestra.”. The Quartet’s playing of classical and early romantic repertoire very definitely maintains the same high standards for which its ‘parent’ orchestra is known amongst lovers of the baroque.
Certainly, the performance of Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, K.478 by this ‘new’ incarnation of Arte dei Suonatori is deeply impressive. Not for the only time, the key of G minor drew from Mozart, in the opening movement of this superb quartet, music full of passionate urgency and imbued with a strong dramatic sense. Full justice is done to this music by the Arte dei Suonatori Piano Quartet; their playing is richly expressive but always disciplined. The precision of the balance and interplay between the four members of the quartet is a delight. Though the quartet treat the music with the seriousness it deserves and needs, there is also an audible joy in what they are doing. They articulate with equal conviction and persuasiveness both the exquisite lyricism of the central Andante and the qualified gaiety of the closing Allegro. Surely only those with a deeply rooted antipathy to historically informed performance or ‘period instruments’ (all four musicians play modern copies of instruments from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century) are likely to be able to resist this performance. Of recordings on modern instruments, I remain fond of that on Hyperion, by Paul Lewis and the Leopold String Trio, but I feel sure that from now on I shall turn more often to the Arte dei Suonatori Piano Quartet.
I have left until last the third Polish composer whose work appears on this disc: Franciszek Lessel. This has a certain aptness in that he was a less important figure than either Elsner - who, through his multifarious activities as composer, conductor, teacher, music publisher and critic, as well as through his influence on Chopin (who dedicated his first piano sonata to Elsner) did much to shape the development of Polish music - or Szymanowska, who had a Europe-wide reputation as a pianist and deserves at least a minor place in the history of music for the piano. Lessel was born, in the city of Pulawy in eastern Poland, into a family of Czech descent which had a strong interest in music; his father, Wincenty Ferdynand was a composer and pianist and gave the young Franciszek his first music lessons. Towards the end of the 1790s Lessel was active as a musician in the salons of Warsaw, both as a pianist and as part of a string sextet which also included Karol Kurpiński, later a significant violinist and conductor. In 1799 Lessel went to Vienna to study architecture, in which he obtained a degree; but he also took the chance to study with Haydn. Quite a number of references to Lessel can be found in the volumes of H.C. Robbins Landon’s Haydn: Chronicle and Works. Indeed, Robbins Landon describes Lessel as “one of Haydn’s favourite pupils”. Haydn seems to have introduced Lessel to such figures as Clementi, Cherubini and Beethoven. Lessel (who dedicated at least two of his compositions to Haydn) stayed in Vienna and his lessons with Haydn were terminated only by the great composer’s death in 1809. During this lengthy stay in Vienna, Lessel made occasional visits back to Poland; on one such occasion he was employed as a court musician by the princely family of the Lubormirski. In 1810, after Haydn’s death, he returned more permanently to Poland. He gave well-received concerts, largely of his own music, in Krakow and Warsaw. But soon he chose (or was obliged) to earn his living from extra-musical work, such as estate management. Still, to quote Robbins Landon for a last time, Lessel was “the representative of the Haydn in his native country”.
Haydn’s is not, however, the only ‘influence’ audible in Lessel’s Op.5 Piano Trio, which closes this disc. Lessel had clearly heard more than a little of Mozart, as well as some Beethoven. The first movement of his Piano Trio in E major (‘Allegro brillante’) is initially dominated by the fortepiano, a good deal of the writing for which lives up to the marking ‘brillante’. But as the movement develops the strings become more important and there is a greater sense of ‘conversation’ amongst the three instruments. The adagio which follows (‘Ręve: Adagio’) contains some lyrical and, yes, ‘dreamlike’ music, in which violinist Ewa Golińska shines. The strings largely dominate this movement, the violin and cello often foregrounded – Golińska and Maciej Łukaszuk play with winning eloquence. While its melodies are not especially memorable, this is an attractive and satisfying movement. The last movement (‘Rondo: Allegro di molto’) is busy and rhythmically interesting, even if is not especially individual. While no masterpiece, this is an engaging and pleasant trio. Eighteen minutes spent listening to it would not be a waste of time for anyone with an interest in Polish music or the influence of the first Viennese school.
This is, so far as I am aware, the first disc recorded by the Arte dei Suonatori Piano Quartet. I hope there will be more discs – I shall certainly be keen to hear them if there are.
Glyn Pursglove
Performers
Katarzyna Drogosz (fortepiano),
Ewa Golińska (violin), Natalie Reichert (viola) Maciej Łukaszuk (cello)
