Karol Szymanowski (1882 - 1937), Metopes, Op.29 (1915)

Performed by Martin Roscoe

00:00 - No. 1 L'île des Sirènes
05:27 - No. 2 Calypso
11:02 - No. 3 Nausicaa

Karol Szymanowski’s life and career may be seen, from our vantage point, as a twofold quest in which the personal and the national ran in parallel, or, perhaps, were intertwined. On the one hand, he was engaged in a typically post-Romantic search for self-realization as an artist, working towards a full development of his individual musical aims and sensibilities; while on the other, he came more and more to seek an authentic compositional voice that could be heard (one way or another) as distinctively Polish, and also as distinctively modern. Yet his intensity and subjectivism went hand in hand with a strong desire for a certain kind of resolved clarity in the finished musical form—classical finish achieved by another route, perhaps, as an expression of modernity. His aesthetic stance, or let us say more soberly his musical practice as a composer, was eclectic in a stylistic and technical sense. But the subtle power of his invention and his personal mode of utterance were resilient and original enough to absorb and individualize (rather than merely appropriate) such a range of influences, and so turn them to his own advantage.

Between Szymanowski’s early piano works and the Métopes (1915) lies a radical expansion and realignment of aesthetic and technique. This took him from immersion in the dense fugal thinking of Reger to a shadowing of the mature Scriabin’s startling transformation during the first decade of the twentieth century and the leavening, salutary influence of Ravel’s and Debussy’s weightless, diaphanous textures. Devotion to a national tradition dropped from the picture early on, and it is a wider significance, not intrinsic Polishness, that distinguishes Szymanowski in posterity.

The title Métopes denotes the square panels in a Classical (Doric) frieze. The late Christopher Palmer suggested that the composer here recalled a Sicilian example which he had seen in the museum at Palermo. In his Mythes, Op 30, for violin and piano (dating from the same year), Szymanowski conjured an anthropomorphic world in which landscape and living presences mesh, so that it becomes hard to disentangle an intuitive study of character and emotion from the expressionistic extension of these into natural surroundings. Rather in the way that Beethoven in his ‘Pastoral’ Symphony alternated peopled landscapes and human states of mind with raw elemental impressionism, the move from Mythes to Métopes is from a living world to one stylized into a kind of impersonal, frigid brilliance.

Throughout Métopes, freewheeling spontaneity of gesture co-exists paradoxically with the sense of a claustrophobic inner world. The music embodies echoes of Berg’s Piano Sonata, Op 1, while diverging perceptibly from the language of Scriabin—a composer for whom the shackles of inherited sonata structure remained a sometimes insoluble problem in the face of an increasing distance from tonal thinking. That Szymanowski perceived no imperative to replace tonality with some other overarching means of organizing structure remains in itself an arresting aspect of his personality.

(Hyperion)

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