Chopin / Korecka-Soszkowska - Korecka-Soszkowska Plays Chopin - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Bronislawa Kawalla, the first prize winner at the International Bach Competition in Washington, comes from a well-known musical family. She graduated from the Secondary Music School in Krakow in the class of Maria Bilinska-Riegerowa and studied at the Higher State School of Music in Warsaw (currently the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music) in the class of Professor Jan Ekier. She polished her skills in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Monique Haas, as well as at the Academie Internationale de Maurice Ravel with Philippe Entremont. She has recorded for Polish Radio and Television recordings, and has performed in renowned concert halls all over Europe, Canada, the USA, Latin America, and Asia. Kawalla is also devoted to pedagogical work, being a professor at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw. Appropriately, for this she has chosen a programme of music by Chopin.

Chopin's Ballades are not a closed cycle; they were created in different times and circumstances. Moreover, no recommendations of the composer indicating their joint performance have been found. However, listening to them one after another is an extraordinary experience - the history of the artist's life, told with his most intimate musical language, reflecting the entire wealth and experience of his short, yet uncommonly fruitful life. None of Chopin's compositions exceed his ballads, neither in the mastery of the form nor in the beauty of the poetry. Karol Szymanowski, considered as the most outstanding Polish composer after Chopin, opened a new period of his works with Metopes and slightly later Masques, irrevocably departing from the neo-romantic stylistics to his own unique musical language, immersed both in universal European cultural roots and in Polish musical idioms. This by Justyna Gabzdyl, a Polish pianist living in Canada, consists of a very subjective, yet remarkably accurate, synthetic selection of what is most interesting in Polish piano music, and perhaps the most characteristic. Album Tracks 1. Isle of Sirens 2. Calypso 3. Nausicaa 4. Sheherezade 5. Tantris the Clown 6. Don Juan's Serenade 1. Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 2. Ballade No. 2 in F Major, Op. 38 3. Ballade No. 3 in A-Flat Major, Op. 47 4. Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52

Michal Karol Szymanowski, one of the most promising Polish pianists of the young generation, Michal Karol Szymanowski was born in 1988 in Bydgoszcz into a musical family. He graduated with honours from the F. Nowowiejski Academy of Music in Bydgoszcz, where he studied piano with Katarzvna Popwa-Zydron and orchestra and opera conducting with Zygmunt Rychert. At present he continues his piano education as a doctoral student at his alma mater. He simultaneously develops his abilities with Eldar Nebolsin at the Hochschule fur Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin. Album Tracks 1. Barcarolle in F-Sharp Major, Op. 60 2. Nocturne in C-Sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 1 3. Nocturne in B-Flat Major, Op. 16, No. 4 4. No. 1 in a Minor 5. No. 2 in A-Flat Major 6. No. 3 in F-Sharp minor 7. No. 1 Allegretto Grazioso 8. No. 2 Moderato 9. No. 11 in a Minor, 'Winter Wind' 10. No. 10 in B minor 11. Polonaise in F-Sharp minor, Op. 44 12. No. 6 in B-Flat Major 13. Waltz in A-Flat Major, Op. 42 14. Valse de Concert, Op. 3