PROGRAM NOTES SPONSORED BY THOMAS WARD

Commonly hailed as one of the 19th-century’s greatest composers for piano, Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1949) was born at the estate of Countess Justyna Skarbek in Żelazowa Wola, a Polish village about 35 miles west of Warsaw. His father, Mikołaj Chopin, was a French teacher from Lorraine brought to the Countess’s estate to tutor her children; his mother, Tekla Justyna Krzyżanowska, was a young Polish woman who performed domestic labor on the same estate. Soon after the couple met and had their first two children, Fryderyk being the second, they took their growing family and relocated to Warsaw, where Chopin spent the first 20 years of his life.

While in Warsaw, young Fryderyk would develop rapidly as a musician, publishing his first pieces before the age of 8. Józef Elsner, director of the Warsaw Conservatory, became his private instructor during Chopin’s teen years. Elsner would continue to guide him as a pupil until 1829, although some historians seem to regard the young ingénue as largely self-taught. Described by Elsner himself as a “musical genius,” Chopin’s creativity and ambition would carve a blazing path forward within 19th-century piano repertory, reimagining the dramatic capabilities of the instrument within the expressive milieu of European Romanticism.

While still in Warsaw in 1829, just a couple years before his permanent move to Paris, Chopin penned his Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor. The numbering is a misnomer, given that this piece was actually the first piano concerto he wrote, making its sophistication all the more remarkable. Although Chopin’s Nocturnes are some of his most recognizable pieces – noted for their fluid lyricism and technical demands – the same bel canto operatic influences can still be heard here in the frequent ornamental flourishes. The first movement opens dramatically, beginning with a quiet orchestral passage before erupting into a full-voiced fanfare that builds excitement for the main event: the piano’s entrance. Not willing to disappoint, the soloist enters with a quite literal “bang” before taking listeners on a journey through the movement’s two contrasting themes, illuminated by an ample amount of piano pyrotechnics.

Following the standard form of a piano concerto for the early 19th century, Chopin’s second movement takes a moment to breathe and delivers a slow, lyrical piano part that emulates the dreamy writing of his Nocturnes. The middle movement, said by Chopin himself to have been inspired by his feelings for the young Konstancja Gładkowska, in turn inspired the admiration of his own audiences during the concerto’s first few performances. In fact, the composer wrote to a friend that “wherever I turn I hear only of the Adagio.” But the third movement has its own appeal, with some unique orchestral effects – including the violins’ use of the wood of the bow for one passage, and a resonant horn call to announce the final section – and the inclusion of some Polish musical signposts scattered throughout.

About 33 years after the death of Chopin, Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) was born near Kiev on October 3, 1882. He belonged to an upper-class family that had resettled in Ukraine after one of the many partitions of Poland. With such economic privilege, Karol first began his musical education at home. He then transitioned to tutelage at a music school in what is now Kirowograd in 1896. A few years later he moved to Warsaw, beginning private instruction under the Warsaw Music Institute professor Marek Zawirski and then-distinguished composer Zygmunt Noskowski. In Warsaw, Szymanowski formed a group with three other young composers called Young Poland in Music. This group, similar in ideals to the larger Young Poland political movement, sought to elevate contemporary Polish music to the status of “high” art in Europe. During these early years, Szymanowski took inspiration from Polish folk materials, but his music would ultimately still be characterized as “Germanic” in style and ethos.

It would not be until well into the 1910s and 20s and elsewhere in Europe that Szymanowski truly encountered the catalyst for his exploration of Polish traditional music. In Vienna, in particular, where Szymanowski had the opportunity to see Igor Stravinsky’s ballets and meet the composer himself, Szymanowski became inspired by the creative ways that the Russian composer incorporated traditional musical elements into his radical, electric compositions. Glowing about Stravinsky’s Petrushka in 1921, Szymanowski characterized the composer’s incorporations of folk songs as presented “in their absolute nakedness, their somewhat brutal strength, as if torn living from those anonymous mouths which, somewhere . . . sometime . . . overcome by a mysterious emotion, first cried them out resoundingly to the sun.”

Szymanowski’s String Quartet No. 2 was completed in 1927 and crystallizes some of the composer’s most dominant artistic preoccupations throughout his life. The first movement, marked Moderato, dolce e tranquillo, introduces a buzzing, electric atmosphere, coupled with a fluid lyricism that hearkens back to the Polish composer’s earlier infatuation with Impressionism. The harsher sonorities of the second movement, however, remind listeners of his admiration for both Stravinsky and Bartók. It is here that Szymanowski’s interest in traditional Polish highland music (in particular, from the Podhale region of the Tatra Mountains) reveals itself in the raw, intense playing and prevalent use of pizzicato. Finally, in the third movement, two melodies drawn from Podhale folk music furnish the thematic material for a melancholic double fugue, concluding with a brief yet forceful unison statement of one of the movement’s primary melodic motifs.

Emily Masincup, © 2026