Karol Szymanowski (1882 -1937)
Piano Music Vol. 2

Born of aristrocratic, cultured Polish parents, wealthy landowners in the Ukraine (Tymoszówka), Szymanowski learnt piano from the age of ten with Gustav Neuhaus (a relative by marriage, and the father of Heinrich Neuhaus, teacher of Gilels and Richter), finishing his studies in Warsaw (1901-04) under Zygmunt Noskowski (counterpoint and composition) and Marek Zawirski (harmony). The decade before the killing fields of the Great War silenced for ever the old imperial dynasties of his childhood was for him a time of enterprise, discovery and enlightenment. In Busoni's and Strauss's Berlin he co-founded the Young Polish Composers' Publishing Company (Moda Poiska, "Young Poland in Music"), with the purpose of introducing modern Polish music to new audiences. He was oppressed by the anti-Semitic fin-de-siècle Viennese milieu of Mahler and Schoenberg, Klimt and Freud, Hitler and Trotsky. But was lastingly a