Poland has given the world more than its share of pianists — Chopin, Paderewski, Hofmann, Rubinstein, Zimerman — but its composers have often had to fight harder for international attention. This disc makes a persuasive case that the fight has been worth it.
Start with what matters most: the Zarebski quintet is a revelation. Juliusz Zarębski died at thirty-one of tuberculosis, in 1885 — the same year he completed this work — and you can feel in it both the urgency of a man racing against time and the polish of someone who had studied with Liszt himself and absorbed every lesson. The Lisztian fingerprints are everywhere: those grand rhetorical gestures in the piano, melodic ideas that migrate between movements like recurring figures in a novel, a gift for sheer sonic opulence that never quite tips into vulgarity. But Zarębski is not simply a Liszt satellite. The harmonic language has a personal tinge, something slightly modal and distinctly Slavic underneath the late-Romantic surface, and the writing for the string quartet — always the dangerous shoal in piano quintet writing — shows real imagination. Textures thin and thicken with purpose. The slow movement has a sustained lyrical intensity that reminds you of what the Romantics could do when they slowed down and simply sang.
The Lason Ensemble plays it with unambiguous belief. Piotr Salajczyk’s piano is present without being domineering — a genuine achievement in this medium, where the piano can so easily become a bully — and the string playing has warmth and profile in equal measure. Phrases have shape. Climaxes arrive with weight rather than just volume. I haven’t heard the Jonathan Plowright album with the Szymanowski Quartet, which apparently exists, and so I can’t rank these versions against each other. But I can say this interpretation requires no apology.
Grażyna Bacewicz is the best-known figure here, though even she remains considerably underappreciated outside Poland and the specialist record shelves. By 1952, when she wrote the first of her two piano quintets, she had moved well past her earlier neoclassicism into something more angular and compressed. The piece has an elegance that is more steel than silk — precise, a little severe, uninterested in ingratiation. What catches the ear immediately is the rhythmic vitality of the second movement, where folk idioms are absorbed rather than displayed; this is not folk pastiche but folk DNA. The slow movement’s funeral march is genuinely unsettling, not a conventional lament but something colder, more ironic, as if Bacewicz is keeping grief at arm’s length through formal control. It is characteristic of her: the emotion is there, but it’s wearing a coat.
Then there is the Lason piece — short, punchy, named after a festival in Stalowa Wola, a steel town in southeastern Poland. Aleksander Łasoń was in his early twenties when he composed it, and the music has exactly that quality: restless, searching, not yet settled into any single voice. You hear Lutosławski in the controlled aleatory passages and Messiaen in the harmonic coloring, but the work doesn’t feel derivative so much as exploratory. That it makes such a strong impression in thirteen minutes says something real about Łasoń’s gifts.
The piano quintet is genuinely one of the hardest chambers to get right — Schumann’s solution is not Brahms’s, Brahms’s is not Dvořák’s, and Shostakovich’s is not any of theirs. The problem is always texture: five instruments whose combined weight can produce a muddy, undifferentiated roar if the composer isn’t thinking carefully about voicing and space. All three composers here have thought carefully. The recording, made in Poland, does them justice — clean, present, with enough air around the instruments to let the counterpoint breathe.
An indispensable disc for anyone seriously interested in Polish music, and a genuine pleasure for anyone who simply loves the piano quintet repertoire. Don’t wait for a better occasion.
