Silesian Chamber Players - Hamann, Pujol & Galliano - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

National Chamber Players - National Chamber Players [COMPACT DISCS] date 08/06/2002

Halina Krzyzanowska was a Polish pianist and composer. She studied the piano at the Paris Conservatoire with Félix Le Couppey and at the age of 17 won the prix d'honneur. Then she studied counterpoint and composition with Andrès and Ernest Guiraud. She performed throughout Europe, though mainly in France and Poland, and in 1896 was made officier of the Académie de France. In 1900 she was appointed professor of piano at Rennes conservatory. Greatly influenced by Saint-Saëns, Krzyzanowska composed a symphony, a Marche héroïque for orchestra, a Fantasy for piano and orchestra, a string quartet and other chamber works, many solo piano works (including two sonatas, programmatic works and pieces in dance forms), settings of French and Polish poems, incidental music to S. Duchinska's play Jasyr ('Tatar Captivity'), a one-act opera Magdusia (to a libretto by H. Swiejkowski, composed before 1894) and an oratorio. Unfortunately, her works are today largely unknown. This album featuring the Camerata Vistula String Quartet aims to change that, and presents a program of her chamber music.

The present album is another in a series featuring music by Józef Zeidler, one of the leading representatives of the Classicist period in Polish music. He is a composer who for many years was known solely to a narrow circle of musicologists, one of the reasons being a scarcity of existing biographical data. What is known is that Zeidler arrived at the Holy Mountain in Gostyn in 1775. The local monastery of St. Philip Neri boasted one of the finest musical chapels in the whole of western Poland. It also ran a school for talented youth. Zeidler died on April 4, 1809 and was buried in the basilica of the Congregation of St. Philip Neri. A large part of his oeuvre has survived in the monastery archives; some of his compositions are kept in the musical collections of other monastery libraries in western Poland, as well as in the Pauline monastery at the Black Madonna shrine in Czestochowa. The works included in the present recording come from the musical collections in Gostyn, Gniezno and Poznan.