I have been an admirer of Karlowicz’s orchestral
music since hearing a broadcast of the turbulently romantic
tone poem Eternal Songs played by the Chicago Symphony
conducted by Rozhdestvensky. After that I managed to track
down Olympia CDs of the Violin Concerto and tone poems. In
the last decade or so Karlowicz has been taken up by Hyperion,
Chandos and Polish CD Accord. Tasmin Little champions the
Violin Concerto with the Moszkowski concerto on Hyperion
(see review)
and Konstanty Kulka has the Karlowicz concerto with two of
the composer’s tone poems – the one above plus the wonderful
Eternal Songs (see review).
The Concerto is one of those works you must hear
if you like the Glazunov and the Tchaikovsky perhaps with
a dash of the Bruch G minor. It is a succulent and dashingly
whistleable work. Dorota Anderszewska and Layer give it its
most extended recording running to just short of half and
hour where Little and Kulka run it to about 27 minutes. You
can tell this immediately the Layer version starts. That
majestic gestural opening is so broad that it saps the works
energy and a sense of flaccidity hangs over the proceedings
for a good five minutes. Things then improve and it is fair
to say that Anderszewska’s Chung-like tight tone is a pleasure
to hear as is the effective and theatrically dramatic accelerando
she makes in the fireworks at the send of the first movement.
I can fully understand why she was lauded by the French press
as "the pure diamond of this concert." If you are
a fancier of this work you will of course have to have this
because you will learn more about the concerto. However it
is a matter of considering it alongside other obscure and
deleted versions by the wonderful Wanda Wilkomirska on Polski
Nagrania PNCD142 (although I see she takes over 30 minutes
with Rowicki – who was also the conductor for the first version
recorded by Kulka), Kaja Danczowska CDM
LDC 278 1088 and the original 1960s one by Kulka on Olympia OCD304. Tell me if I have missed any. I would like to add them here
and also to hear them if possible.
This is a full price issue and I am afraid its
parsimony rules it out in the face of the competition principally
from Polish CD Accord. Which also offers the same coupling
as well as the remarkable Eternal Songs. The symphonic poem Stanislas
and Anna Oswiecimowie was inspired by a painting by the
Polish artist Stanislas Bergmann. This depicts the fatal
incestuous loves of a brother and sister. The music is sumptuously
late-romantic with dashes of Strauss (Don Juan), early
Szymanowski (Concert Overture), Bax (Spring Fire),
Elgar (Froissart), Delius (Song of the High Hills)
and Scriabin (Poem of Ecstasy) – a heady brew. Layer
gives an excellent performance and is extremely well recorded;
superb work from the horns and trumpets ion the first five
minutes. The work has the rhapsodic-ecstatic character of
two Francesca da Rimini works – the tone poem by Tchaikovsky
and the opera by Rachmaninov. If it has a weakness it is
a tendency to sink into a ruminative Franckian Psyché-like
dream from which it wakes but all too often sinks back into
repletion. Layer makes a wonderful job of it with the final
ten minutes redolent of Rachmaninov Symphony 2 and the Bernard
Herrmann’s Gothic music for Citizen Kane.
Applause is retained for both the concerto and
the tone poem. It is surprisingly stolid in the case of the
concerto.
The booklet notes hit all the right bases.
Some good stuff here but as a disc in competition
with others it cannot rival the generosity and excellence
of the Polish CD Accord ACD 071-2
which together with the Hyperion are to be preferred in the
concerto.
Rob Barnett
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Dorota Anderszewska
(violin)
