Songs & Sonnets
- Publisher: PWM Edition
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Cat. no. 70023
- Kod producenta: ANA 10
- EAN: 5907795209562
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Singing and vocal music have accompanied me since earliest childhood. Popular tunes, melodies hummed by my mother, the tolling of church bells — all this captured my imagination and bore fruit in my later music, in which the human voice occupies an important place.
I wrote the cycle of five pieces to words by Polish poets entitled The Face of the Sea, which I consider as one of my most ambitious works, posing a considerable difficulty for the performers. The formidably demanding piano part provides an impressive background for the virtuosic vocal solo. Each of the five songs exploits a different scale, which determines both its melodic contour and its harmonic layer.
Three Songs to poems by Stanisław Ryszard Dobrowolski (1987) naugurated my collaboration with Józef Frakstein.
The Sonnets by Michelangelo, setting the beautiful Polish translation by Leopold Staff, came in the following year. The initial piano chords are based on the first measures of Gesualdo da Venosa’s madrigal Moro, lasso.
1990 saw my work on the Three Sonnets to Don Quixote, whose texts I found in the extensive preface to some old edition of Don Quixote, comprising about a dozen sonnets by Cervantes in Anna Czerny’s Polish renderings.
The vocal cycle From the Viliya to words by Helena Massalska-Kołaczkowska is dedicated to the memory of my mother. Varied in mood and character, it evokes the memories of landscapes and customs from the prewar Vilnius region. In the second of the songs, Kaziúk, I attempted to recreate the atmosphere of the famous fair held in Vilnius.
I cherish the timid hope that this album, featuring the world-famous singer Tomasz Konieczny and his concert partner, the outstanding pianist Lech Napierała, will dispose the audience favourably toward the presented songs and may even merit a second listening. This would give me genuine satisfaction and compensate me for the ‘ordeal of artistic work’.
[Romuald Twardowski - composer]
- Series: ANAKLASIS
- No. of edition: 1
- Published: 2020
- Type: CD
| The Fave of the Sea | |
| Sonnets by Michelangelo | |
| Trzy sonety pożegnanie | |
| Three Songs to words by Stanisław Ryszard Dobrowolski | |
| Three Sonnets to Don Quixote | |
| From the Viliya |
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