Phoenix

Album review

The main attraction of this commercially successful release from Warner Classics is a world premiere. One might not have thought much music was being written in Warsaw in 1944 (although, check out Czeslaw Milosz's poem Song on the End of the World from roughly the same time), but composer Ludomir Różycki was at work on a violin concerto, and as he fled the city, he buried the partially finished manuscript in his garden. A piano score survived, and construction workers later found the buried score. What's heard on this recording is a new version by violinist Janusz Wawrowski that combines these two scores with modifications to the violin part to make it more idiomatic to the instrument. Wawrowski gave the premiere of this version, and here, the world premiere recording. It's a two-movement work that's difficult to categorize; it is episodic in structure, and the nearest equivalent might be Korngold. Much of the work has a gentle, lyrical quality that's wholly unexpected given the time and place, and especially inasmuch as there are hints of the wartime atmosphere scattered around the piece. Wawrowski has obviously gotten to know the work well, and his performance is affecting. He combines it with a performance of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35: the "Phoenix" title refers to the composers' both having lived through periods of difficulty, in Tchaikovsky's case, his disastrous marriage. The market was not in deep need of another one of these, but Wawrowski's reading has an appealing lightness, and he is sensitively backed throughout by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Grzegorz Nowak. An intriguing addition to the growing repertory of music composed in the depths of World War II.

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