You might be tempted to pass this disc over if you come across it shopping online or on foot, but you’d be missing a treat. Alexandre Tansman’s Suite for Two Pianos with Orchestral Accompaniment is a gem. It opens like some pianistic gloss on the first few bars of Goldmark’s Rustic Wedding Symphony, then takes off like a Stravinskian shot. The lovely second movement mixes Gershwin with a touch of Poulenc’s Mouvements perpétuels, while a rather different sort of brief but dazzling “Perpetuum Mobile” (shades of Prokofiev perhaps) precedes the lengthy, tuneful “Variations, double fugue, and finale on a Slavic theme”. It’s every inch a charmer, and the team of Pikul and Wolak-Moszynska plays brilliantly. Aside from some funky sounding percussion (a too-close tambourine in particular), the Lublin Philharmonic sounds both confident and accomplished.
Andrzej Pikul gets solo billing in Karol Szymanowski’s fabulous Symphonie concertante, a masterfully written, tuneful, energetic work that still hasn’t achieved the popularity in concert that it surely deserves. Pikul projects the filigreed piano writing in the first two movements with the necessary lightness of touch, then pounds the ivories most satisfyingly in the rhythmic feast that is the finale. Once again conductor Piotr Wijatkowski and the Lublin Orchestra offer colorful and sympathetic accompaniments, and the recording perfectly balances the piano against the orchestra. Hats off to Dux for documenting some of the finer things happening in Polish music today.
