专辑简介

This CD is the latest installment in the series of recordings of compositions by Roman Palester, which have been produced by the University of Warsaw Foundation in cooperation with the University of Warsaw Library. Following on discs devoted to Palester’s chamber works for two violins, his piano compositions, and his string quartets, this recording presents works for string trio, violin and cello, and for string trio with oboe. As with the majority of Palester’s oeuvre, these works have never been previously recorded and the scores of most of them remain unpublished. The autograph manuscripts of these works are held by the University of Warsaw Library, to whom they were given by the composer in his will. During Palester’s lifetime, only the String Trio No. 2 was published (but this edition, by the Italian publisher Suvini Zebroni is effectively impossible to find today). The Sonata for Cello and Violin was most likely not performed during Palester’s lifetime. The remaining works were performed sporadically and were sometimes performed for radio broadcast; they however have little traction among performers or contemporary audiences. In distinction from the quartets, which were composed before or during the Second World War, the string trios, sonata, and suite were written after 1945. The earliest of these works is the String Trio No. 1, which was composed with Palester’s dear friend Tadeusz Ochlewski in mind. Ochlewski was the director of the Polish Music Publishers at the time and the first version of the trio includes the dedication “à T. O.” Relations between Ochlewski and Palester would soon, however, sour. Palester, who was living in Paris after 1947, did not understand that Ochlewski, as the head of a state institution, had to adapt his publishing policy to a continually changing political situation. Meanwhile, Ochlewski accused Palester of being cut off from the realities of early postwar Poland. But in the stormy correspondence of these two eminent musicians, we also find passages that are more personal, like this one from a letter written by Ochlewski to Palester on November 26, 1947, some two days following the world premiere of the string trio in Cracow: “Recently, I have had two pleasures because of you: your letter on my name day and the performance of your Trio. I liked it. I liked it no less than I liked your third quartet, maybe even more so. I especially like the third movement in terms of its form and concept, although the second movement is too long and brings to mind Szymanowski’s first [string quartet]. As I listened to your music, my thoughts about you interceded between the sounds and my ears: As I was listening, it was as if we were close to each other like we once were. You seemed to me in this work to be more direct than elsewhere and I would be very curious if you searched for this quality or if it ‘came to you’ as you wrote the trio. It sounded great, even in the radio broadcast, and it was fitting that there was no second violin. Compose for as few instruments as possible!” Palester was unable to attend the premiere of his composition, but he most likely heard it during the piece’s next performance in Paris in December 1947. Although the Polish Music Publishers intended to publish it, the growing rift between Palester and the publisher, compounded by his decision to remain abroad, unfortunately meant that these plans never came to fruition. Many years later, he revised the composition, and this revised version is here recorded. The String Trio No. 1 is fully atonal and very different from the more neoclassical work that Palester wrote at around this same time, the Serenade for Two Flutes and String Orchestra. The trio comprises three movements: the first movement is based on the motive of a second, which appears both in the slow introduction and in the later faster section. The second movement has a lightly joking character (often using pizzicato) and one may find in it traces of a rondo form. The final movement is slow and contains many intriguing timbral techniques, like chords that combine pizzicato with glissandos. The String Trio No. 2, from 1957, is a fully dodecaphonic composition. Palester consistently used a series in it, even as he remained loyal to classical forms. In the composer’s commentary on the work, we read: “the work makes use of the twelve-tone series and is fully a-thematic. Where there does occasionally appear a repetition or a three-part form, it is always as a consequence of the retrograde, inverted, or retrograde-inverted form of the row. The first movement has a free structure, limiting itself to the intervals that are found in the fundamental form of the row. The second movement begins from a unison presentation of the series, its inversion, and retrograde version and further develops it in the form of a canon. The third movement indeed follows a tripartite form, with a clearly differentiated trio section. In the reprise, the row appears in inversion and retrograde of the opening movement. A short, highly through-composed slow movement concludes the work.” We will only add to this that the row used in this trio is identical to the one that Palester used in the Piccolo Concerto for orchestra, which dates from the same period. The String Trio No. 2 belongs to among the most esotericof Palester’s compositions. It also presents numerous challenges for the performers, due to its constantly changing articulations, uncomfortable changes in position, and complicated polyrhythms. Palester himself valued the work highly and counted it among the best of his compositions. Nearly ten years later, Palester wrote his next chamber works: The Sonata for Cello and Violin as well as the Suite for Four Musicians, for oboe and string trio. This first work, according to the composer, alluded to the youthful but lost composition that he had written for the same ensemble. Palester commented: “The first of my works to be publicly performed was the Sonatina for Violin and Cello. I wrote it in 1929, while in the composition class of [Kazimierz] Sikorski and it was performed for [Karol] Szymanowski and [Grzegorz]Fitelberg in class and then at a schoolwide recital (with Mittelman and Neuteich). Of course, I didn’t keep track of the score and I don’t know what happened to it. But I thought about the work from time to time and a few years ago I decided to ‘resurrect’ it. I built on the few parts that I remembered from this earlier work, yet the new whole is rather a memory and a reference to my musical style of that time. The music itself is written anew, with the exception of a couple of themes. In a word, the reconstruction of this work had a rather sentimental character. In 1929, the title of the work was ‘Sonatina,’ but today I simply call it a ‘Sonata,’ because it is now longer and more developod. The new ‘Sonata’ is made up of four movements, in which the fourth alludes to the first.” The youthful Sonatina had a clear significance for the composer, since he recalled in the last years of his life in a letter to Zofia Helman: “Szymanowski listened to the work with the score in hand, not saying a word, until at one moment he pointed to a phrase in the score and said coldly, ‘that did not sound the worst’. . .” Without the above-cited commentary from the composer, we would likely be unable to guess that the Sonata for Cello and Violin alludes to Palester’s earlier Sonatina. Indeed, the Sonata is typical of Palester’s mature stylein its total chromatic construction. Like the String Trio No. 2, the concluding movement is calm—and any allusion to the classic cycle is only symbolic. We know practically nothing about the conditions in which the Suite for Four Musicians was written, other than that it dates to a year before the Sonata for Cello and Violin. The premiere of the work took place in Poland during a concert in the Royal Castle in Warsaw on October 20, 1987.