Brzezinski Piano Works – Barbara Pakura

Somewhere in the vast unindexed cellar of Polish music there is a shelf marked “gentlemen composers” — lawyers, doctors, civil servants who wrote sonatas on Sundays and kept their day jobs. Franciszek Brzezinski belongs on that shelf, and Acte Préalable has hauled him out into the light whether posterity asked for him or not.

He was, first and foremost, a critic, presumably scribbling reviews not unlike this one in Warsaw newspapers now yellowed past legibility. That he also composed, and studied with Max Reger, tends to get lost in the footnote. Reger’s fingerprints are not really audible here. What you hear instead is a mild, cultivated, faintly wistful voice, closer to the parlor than the lecture hall, for all his teacher’s contrapuntal rigor.

The Triptique, op. 5, is the most ambitious thing on the disc: three preludes and fugues that genuflect toward Bach without ever quite believing themselves worthy of the altar. The fugue writing is dutiful rather than combative, nothing like the knotty severity of Reger’s own organ works, but there’s real fluency in the voice-leading, and Barbara Pakura articulates the lines with a schoolmarm’s clarity that suits the music rather well. I wanted more air in the sonorities, more pedal-shaded ambiguity in the climaxes. She gives us honesty instead of mystery. Fair trade, given the material.

Suite Polonaise, op. 4, is the disc’s best argument for itself. Here the salon and the ballroom meet the folk fiddle, and Brzezinski’s harmonic vocabulary, never daring, always tasteful, finds its natural home. Think of it as Chopin filtered through a slightly perfumed, Silver Age nostalgia, the kind of lyricism Bortkiewicz made a career out of a generation later. The mazurka-inflected movements have real charm; there’s a nostalgic tug in the slower sections that Pakura, to her credit, doesn’t oversell. She lets the rubato breathe without turning it soupy, a real temptation in this repertoire, and one plenty of pianists fail to resist.

Tema con Variazioni, op. 3, is pedagogic at heart. You can practically hear the metronome ticking in the background of some variations. But there are two or three where Brzezinski’s invention briefly catches fire: a sudden minor-key turn, an unexpected registral leap. Not enough to make the set indispensable. Enough to make you wish he’d trusted his instincts more often.

The Toccata barely justifies its opus number, under three minutes, gone before it argues its case, and the Waltz is pure salon confection, the kind of encore a nineteenth-century recitalist would toss off between weightier fare, all charm and no ambition. Pleasant. Forgettable within the hour. Nothing wrong with either judgment.

Pakura’s touch throughout is clean, unfussy, occasionally a shade dry in tone. The piano itself sounds close-miked, every hammer-thud audible, which does the more intimate pages no favors. But she never oversells material that would collapse under interpretive weight it wasn’t built to carry.

Is this an essential disc? No. Brzezinski was not a lost genius awaiting rediscovery. He was a well-trained amateur with a genuine, if modest, lyric gift, more valuable now as documentary evidence of Warsaw’s fin-de-siècle musical culture than as a repertory staple. But Acte Préalable’s project of cataloguing every corner of Polish musical life, however minor, has an integrity of its own, and this disc, taken on its own unpretentious terms, rewards an hour’s curious listening. Just don’t expect the violin sonata’s fire here; that, apparently, is where Brzezinski kept his real secrets.