Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra - Polish Accordion Concertos - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

New from Navona Records and Craig Morris comes CHAMBER MUSIC FOR OUR TIMES, a stirring album of original chamber works. MUSIC FOR OUR TIMES is the work of a master craftsman with an ear for poignant lyricism. The album features four pieces, each of which exhaustively explores the colors and timbres available to the chamber ensembles. Critics have called Morris's music Inchextremely intelligent, complex and powerful,Inch and CHAMBER MUSIC FOR OUR TIMES is further evidence of that. It opens with Romance, for Violin and Piano, which finds the violin and piano in one of the most deeply-intimate musical settings imaginable. The delicate interplay between these two instruments suggests both the tenderness and the passion of a budding courtship as it develops from one moment to the next. This is followed by Colors, a piece for string quartet that delves into the rich timbral contrasts that define this centuries-old musical form. The second portion of CHAMBER MUSIC FOR OUR TIMES's program consists of a pair of piano quartets. Johnny and Tony, in particular, is a masterful homage to the chamber music of Brahms and Dvorak, and further reveals Morris's skill for counterpoint and melody. Moods, the second piano quartet and concluding piece on the album, offers an upbeat and lighthearted finale to the collection. CHAMBER MUSIC FOR OUR TIMES is the result of Morris's lifetime of study and practice of the art of composition. His work reveals his profound love and commitment to 19th-century Romantic music; and yet, this background serves merely as a launchpad for his own compositions. Far from derivative, Morris uses his deep understanding of the idiom to create novel and captivating works-works that lovers of tonal chamber music are sure to find at once familiar and refreshing.

This album is of high personal significance for us. The works presented here were written especially for our duet by an outstanding Polish composer. Each of these pieces has a history of it's own and brings back various memories. Most of all, it presents a fascinating world of sounds that we would like you to experience. Marcin Blazewicz's compositions are saturated with unusual emotionality, sometimes with drama. Of particular significance to the composer's style is expressiveness and tonal tensions, as is clearly heard in the Double Concerto for Violin, Accordion and Symphony Orchestra and in the Sonata for Violin and Accordion subtitled 'Night Full of Sins'. This album is also special because it is the first one with Marcin Blazewicz's compositions released a few months after his death. At the same time, it is an album that the composer personally worked on, together with us. We believe it is a real honor that such a great composer entrusted us with the performance of his works. We are grateful for the opportunity to learn from him during our conversations and joint work on the scores of the pieces that were personally dedicated to us. With this album, we want to commemorate this great man and our musical friend, who died suddenly and prematurely. We wish to present some of the last works by this extraordinary composer, whose greatest desire, as he often emphasized, was to reach out to listeners and move them with his music. (Karolina Mikolajczyk, Iwo Jedynecki)

Compositions that already on a first hearing leave behind a uniquely original impression. This is what klassik-heute. Com wrote after the of our first album with piano trios by Emilie Mayer. Her extensive chamber oeuvre for piano also contains two piano quartets. She composed these two works, one in E flat major and the other in G major, at the end of the 1850s. At the time Emilie Mayer was an esteemed composer residing in Berlin most of her works were performed with success, and she enjoyed broad recognition in music circles. Each of her quartets consists of four movements. Here her model in formal matters was not so much Mozart or Beethoven but Schumann, whose sole Piano Quartet op. 47 had been published a good fifteen years before. Considering her music as a whole, we may say that in her piano quartets, just as in her chamber oeuvre in general, Emilie Mayer was a compellingly independent composer with firm rooting in classical models who succeeded in developing a romantic musical language all of her own.