Violin Concerto No.1, Op.35

Polish composers, it seems, have to be either as overwhelmingly great as Fryderyk Chopin or as massively hyped as Henryk Gorecki to achieve popularity outside their own country. Karol Szymanowski is scarcely known here and yet - with his genius for ecstatic melody, voluptuos harmony and enchanting orchestral colour - he is not only one of the most original but also one of the most attractive of of the late-romantic generation of composers

The First Violin Concerto, written in 1916 in collaboration with Paul Kochanski - who wrote the cadenza and who was identified with the work during its period of international popularity in the 1920s - is a particularly inspired example of Szymanowski’s art. Cast in a complex single-movement form and sustained by a rhapsodic solo violin part, it is based on the poem May Night by Szymanowski’s Polish contemporary Tadeusz Micinski. The poem is too long to quote here and, besides, the music is quite self-sufficient and needs no programme to explain it. But a short extract will give some idea of the heavily scented exoticism of both the poem and the concerto:

I wandered once through the colonnades that Abderrahman made for his beloved, in the amethyst night of Sheherazade, with talismans burning in the sky . . . . Pan plays his pipe in the oak woods, a lilting tune for dancing Ephemerides, tangled in an amorous embrace, eternally young and sacred. . . .

The unique and prophetic quality of the scoring in the opening bars is an immediate indication of what we have been missing by neglecting the music of Szymanowski. They repay careful listening not only for the sake of their colours but also for their thematic content - the four-note ostinato in the violins, the oboe version of it, the birdsong figuration in the rest of the woodwind. These apparently volatile scents and sounds of a May night are the slender but inexhaustible basis of the whole construction. All the themes of the concerto, the most sensuous solo violin melodies and the most energetic expression of orchestral energy, derive from the opening bars.

The same opening material also forms a sort of ritornello which recurs, often much transformed, between the main sections of the work. There is a vivace first and then a lovely slow section with a hazily accompanied quasi-cadenza. The main part of the construction is a scherzo-rondo with ever longer slow episodes, the last of them based on a langorous Spanish-sounding melody with many repeated notes. This group of notes assumes a life of its own and eventually leads into Kochanski’s cadenza, which is remarkably apposite in its place. The repeated notes also play an important part in the big orchestral climax after the cadenza and are among the soloist’s last quiet reminiscences at the end of the work.

Rupert Avis

Although neither Karol Szymanowski nor his Hungarian counterpart Bela Bartók was a violinist, or a string-player of any kind, they were both highly effective in extending the expressive range of the violin. The secret in both cases was a close association with a violinist allied to the composer’s own acute sensitivity to sound. The violinist in Szymanowski’s life was Pawel Kochanski, whom he first met when they were both in their teens in Warsaw in 1901 and who was to be an even more important a factor in his development than those other outstanding Polish musicians, the pianist Artur Rubinstein and the conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg. Mity, the most successful of his chamber works, and the two Violin Concertos were written not only for Kochanski but also in active collaboration with him.

As Szymanowski wrote many years later, he and Kochanski had created “a new style, a new mode of expression for the violin… All works related to this style (no matter how much creative genius they reveal) came later, that is through the direct influence of Mity and the First Violin Concerto, or else through direct collaboration with Pawel.” What had happened was that Kochanski’s outstanding qualities as a violinist - the alluring sweetness of his sound and his easy fluency of line even in the highest positions - were a perfect match for the musical images cherished by the composer at a time when his interest in the exotic and erotic aspects of myth coincided with a passion for the impressionistic poetry of Debussy and Ravel.

The First Violin Concerto, which was completed in 1916, is perhaps the most inspired expression of that unique and very personal aesthetic. It is said to be based on Tadeusz Micinski’s “May Night” and, although efforts have been made to minimise its significance, the poem does have much in common, in terms of atmosphere and picturesque detail, with the music: I wandered once through the colonnades that Abderrahman made for his beloved, in the amethyst night of Sheherazade, with talismans burning in the sky . . . . Pan plays his pipe in the oak woods, a lilting tune for dancing Ephemerides, tangled in an amorous embrace, eternally young and sacred. . . . It could well be, indeed, that “May Night” is the source of the one problem in the appreciation of the work, which is its long single-movement span (lasting about twenty-five minutes) constructed more according to poetic impulse, it seems, than according to classical concerto precedence.

It is possible, however, though only by means of a drastic over-simplification, to trace a broad concerto outline through a central slow episode to a scherzo, a cadenza and a kind of finale. A recurring feature is the evocative nature study in the opening bars - the rustling strings, the chattering piano and oboe, the finely detailed bird calls on a variety of woodwind. Immediately contrasted with it is the magical entry of the solo violin in a characteristically melodious cantilena poised high on the E-string. These two elements, an agitated orchestra and an ecstatic violin, alternate and mingle, with some exchanges of identity, throughout the first section of the work. New themes are spilled out everywhere but most significantly of all when, after a briefly amorous duet with a horn, the violin introduces a high-lying chromatic melody with a yearning upward inflection.

Preceded by a clear recall of the nature study from the opening bars, the central slow episode is similarly abundant in melodic ideas, most of them expressions of violin eloquence. The climax of the section floods in on a tide of orchestral passion, however, before it recedes to leave a mournfully solitary cor anglais to offset an attenuated allusion to the yearning melody high on the violin.

The scherzo, preceded by another recall of the nature study and based on a theme in vigorous triplets first heard on woodwind, is a marked contrast, in spite of lyrical allusions to earlier themes and an extended middle section languorously moving to a seductive dance tune in an exotic rhythm of repeated notes.

Given such a wealth of melodic material, it would be difficult and, for a composer in Szymanowski’s spontaneously creative frame of mind, too schematic to present a comprehensive recapitulation. Pawel Kochanski’s cadenza does, however, focus attention on the yearning melody high on the E-string again and the vigorous scherzo theme in muscular multi-stopped harmonies. The rest - a particularly splendid orchestral peroration and another recall of the opening nature sounds linked to a reminder of the magical first solo entry - is reflection. After a last nostalgic echo of the exotic dance tune, the solo violin evaporates into the May night air.

Gerald Larner©