Exercises In Exotica

Simon Rattle has been a strong advocate of the music of Szymanowski and he returned to his old band the City Of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for this disk of orchestral songs and ballet music. The central piece is Harnasie, a ballet-pantomime in two tableaux. There is much work for the CBSO Chorus to do in this piece under chorus master Simon Halsey and a tenor soloist ( Timothy Robinson ) also features. The tale is about the abduction of a bride on her wedding day by bandits and her subsequent infatuation with the bandit chief. The tale comes from the Tatras and Carpathians and Szymanowski has an obvious love for his native regions depicted here in sound. He also has something of a debt to Stravinsky and the piece also occupies similar territory to Prokofiev's Scythian Suite. It would be interesting to see it staged. The other two song cycles on the disk are Songs of a Fairy Tale Princess with soprano Iwona Sobotka backed by sparse orchestral settings and the more substantial Love Songs Of Hafiz sung by mezzo Katarina Karneus. The fairy tale settings are often wordless with the coloratura and melismas of the soloist dominating. The Hafiz songs are taken from translations of 14th century Persian poetry and the orchestrations have an ( imagined ? ) oriental tinge to them. An exercise in exotica, beautifully sung.