Polish State Philharmonic Orchestra, Karol Stryja - Szymanowski: Songs with Orchestra (1996)

This is a beautiful album of Songs with Orchestra by Szymanowski. The Polish State Philharmonic Orchestra is skillfully deployed by Karol Stryja who is a passionate advocate for this music. There are nineteen songs. How lovely it would have been if there had been a translation of the words of the songs included in the package because it requires a bit of effort to discover how the music fits these words. Another thing that would have been helpful would have been for each song to occupy a track. There are 3 fragments from a Christian religious poem by Jan Kasprowicz on tracks 5 - 7. There are Eight Love Songs of Hafiz on track 1, Three Songs of a Fairy-Tale Princess on track 3, Four Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin on track 4, and Roxana's Song from King Roger on track 4. I could not get my head around the first track. For me a good route proved to be tracks 5-7, followed by 1, then 3, 2 and finishing with 4. The alto Anna Malewcz-Madej gives an impression of the depths agony and of the holiness and strength of God in the early work based on parts of a poem by Jan Kasprovicz. The titles of the Love Songs of Hafiz op.26 give an impression of the ways in which Szymanowski's romanticism in the style of Strauss and Mahler is overtaken by his love of the Orient 1. Desire. 2 The East Wind in Love. 3. Dance 4. Pearls of my Heart. 5. Eternal Youth. 6. Your Voice. 7 Drinking Song and 8. Tomb of Hafiz. Of the words of poems, Songs of a Fairytale Princess, by his sister, and first written for soprano and piano in 1915- three were orchestrated in 1934. They again portray the oriental night.(Lonely Moon, The Nightingale and Dance). Jadwiga Gulanka has quite a wide vibrato. The music shimmers and is langorous and sensuous. I like the Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin. There is esctasy in the music and in the tenor voice of Riszard Minkiewicz with its portrayal of intimate physical imagery and desire. Without a doubt the heights are reached in Roxana's Song from King Roger. She is intoxicated by 'the shepherd' pointing to the highest truths of sensual existence - instinct, as opposed to the world of illusion and intellectual distance - reason. What a wonderful climax to this CD is provided by the intensity of the soprano, Barbara Zagorzanka!