Leon Botstein - Music of Szymanowski (2000)

The Concert Overture is a hugely gifted young composer's homage to Richard Strauss, and fully worthy of its model in impetuousness, rich sonority and close-woven polyphony. The Second Symphony is no less rich but more disciplined, with Reger's influence added to (and modifying) that of Strauss, and with Szymanowski's own high colouring, sinuous melody and tonal adventurousness now in their first maturity. The Infatuated Muezzin songs are a high point of his middle period, Debussian harmony and florid orientalising arabesques fusing to an aching voluptuousness, colour now applied with the refinement of a miniaturist.

Leon Botstein is fully aware of the quite different palettes these pieces use, and the orchestra play splendidly.

Wordsong (Telarc's translation for Spopiewnie) is the key to Szymanowski's final phase, a setting of five poems in an artificial language, using Slavonic roots to suggest a sort of 'pre-Polish'.

Szymanowski responded to the poems' assonances, rhythms and alliterations (he couldn't resist 'spodzik spowi spowisienkie'), finding for them a fusion of folk elements, archaisms and melodies that retain something of the discarded middle period's exoticism.

You sense the influence of Stravinsky (Les noces in particular) and hear already both the folk vigour and the ritual purity of Szymanowski's late style (in the third song, too, there's a startling pre-echo of the slow movement of Górecki's Third). There's a slight, attractive tremor to Kilanowicz's voice, but she has both the almost white purity and the flexible coloratura the songs need. It's very hard to make a single adverse comment about this important addition to the discography. — Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010