Brzezinski Piano Works and Violin Sonata by Pakura

Some names survive by accident, others by neglect, and a few — like Franciszek Brzezinski — by the peculiar diligence of Polish independent labels determined that nothing shall go unrecorded, however slender the case for its rescue. Acte Préalable has made something of a mission out of this kind of archaeology, and I confess a real affection for the enterprise even when, as here, the results are decidedly mixed.

Brzezinski himself would probably be startled by the attention. He earned his living as a lawyer, wrote criticism for a living wage or its Polish equivalent, and composed on the side — a gentleman-amateur in the old Central European sense, though his teachers were nothing to sneeze at. He studied with Reger, of all people, and took piano lessons from Jan Kleczynski, a pedagogue of real stature in Warsaw circles at the end of the nineteenth century. That pedigree shows. This is not naive music. It’s music by someone who knew exactly what forms he was inhabiting and chose, deliberately, not to leave them.

The Toccata barely registers — under three minutes, competently made, gone before you’ve settled into your chair. I’m not sure it earns its own opus number, frankly, and Pakura dispatches it efficiently without pretending it’s more than it is. The Waltz is salon fare, charming in a faded-photograph way, the kind of piece that would have sounded lovely drifting from an open window in Łódź around 1901. Neither piece asks to be taken seriously and neither should be.

The real interest lies elsewhere.

Triptique, op. 5, is the most quietly ambitious thing on the disc — three linked preludes and fugues that bow, unmistakably, toward Bach, though filtered through a harmonic language that owes something to Reger’s dense chromatic thinking. Each panel has its own temperature: the first austere, almost stern, the second more searching, the third arriving at something like resolution without ever quite abandoning contrapuntal rigor for its own sake. Pakura’s voicing here is clean — she doesn’t over-pedal the fugal entries, lets the inner voices breathe, which matters enormously in music this dependent on textural clarity.

Suite Polonaise, op. 4, is the disc’s most immediately winning stretch, and here the Bortkiewicz comparison becomes unavoidable — that same nostalgic lyricism, native dance rhythms lightly stirred in rather than paraded, harmonies that flirt with Rachmaninov’s richness without ever indulging his excess. Imagine Chopin’s mazurka spirit refracted through a slightly later, more chromatically restless sensibility, and you’re in the right territory. It’s attractive music, well-made, occasionally quite touching — the slow movement has a wistfulness that lingers.

Tema con Variazioni, op. 3, is more schoolroom in intent — you can practically hear the pedagogical scaffolding — but Brzezinski still manages a few genuinely imaginative variations amid the workmanlike ones. Not every variation earns its keep. A couple feel like exercises in figuration for its own sake. But there’s craft here, real craft, and Pakura never condescends to the material even when the material invites condescension.

As for the pianist: Barbara Pakura plays with unfussy sympathy throughout, tone rounded rather than steely, tempos sensible rather than showy. This isn’t demonstrative virtuoso pianism — nothing here calls for it — but she has clearly lived with these scores, and her instincts about rubato in the Suite Polonaise strike me as exactly right, neither too free nor metronomically stiff. The recorded sound is close, a little dry in the upper register, but honest.

Will this repertoire displace Bortkiewicz, or Karłowicz, or any of the other rediscovered Polish late-Romantics jostling for attention on these small labels? No. Brzezinski was a talented dilettante, not a neglected master, and the disc is more valuable as documentation than as repertoire destined for the standard recital circuit. But documentation matters. Acte Préalable deserves credit for insisting that even minor figures leave a paper trail — or in this case, a very listenable one. Recommended, with modest expectations, to anyone curious about the byways of Polish pianism at the turn of the last century.