Classical Music | Violin Music

Recorded on 04/06/2016, uploaded on 01/11/2017

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Karol Szymanowski’s musical education was completed at the Warsaw Conservatoire. In the years before the Great War, when the composer travelled extensively in Europe and North Africa, the music of Debussy and Stravinsky exerted a colourful influence on him. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Szymanowski returned to Poland and became immersed in the folk music of the Tatra mountain region. He had already been attracted to folk song as early as 1913 when he encountered Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, but it was the highlands of southern Poland, between the years 1923 and 1931, that provided Szymanowski with the stimulus for his ballet-pantomime Harnasie, from which the Robbers' Dance is a set piece.  Based on the legends of the Tatra mountain bandits, Harnasie draws on the region’s musical characteristics, notably its irregular rhythmic accentuation, bare fifths and occasional jarring multiple stops. Although the ballet received its first staged performance in Prague in 1935, this transcription for the composer’s long-time friend and collaborator Pavel Kochanski dates from 1931.     Notes by David Truslove

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.