Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern, Michal Spisak, Jerzy Fitelberg

Poland Abroad Vol. 6

eda records launched the highly regarded series 'Poland Abroad' in 2004 in cooperation with Deutschland-Radio Kultur following a festival that the Konzerthaus Berlin dedicated to Poland, Germany's neighboring country, on the occasion of the eastern expansion of the European Community. The focus of this extensive presentation is on composers who have hitherto attracted little or no attention in international musical life, composers who as a consequence of the political situation (during Poland's partition, during the Nazi occupation and the subsequent Communist yoke) were persecuted or driven into exile, and several of whom survived, sometimes under dramatic circumstances, the war and Shoah. Compositions in all genres - opera, ballet, symphony, concerto, and chamber music - will be presented. The goal is to highlight the outstanding quality of this neglected repertoire by means of reference recordings and to stimulate interest in a central aspect of cultural history (not only of the 20th century), transculturality, and transnationality.The school of Nadia Boulanger, and the influence of Stravinsky and French neoclassicism were decisive for the three composers presented in vol. 6 of the series. Because of their Jewish descent, Jerzy Fitelberg and Tadeusz Kassern were in mortal danger in Europe after 1939. While Fitelberg, a master student of Franz Schreker's, was able to emigrate to New York via Paris, Tadeusz Kassern remained in Poland and survived the Second World War in hiding. In 1945 he went to New York as a diplomat, but broke with Communist Poland in 1948 and applied for political asylum in the United States, which was denied to him for years by the paranoid immigration authorities of the McCarthy era. Michal Spisak, resident in Paris since 1937, vice-president of the Association des Jeunes Musiciens Polonais, spent the war years in a secluded village near Grenoble, returned again to Paris immediately after the war, where he was active until the end of his life, enjoying great success in France as well as in Poland. The recordings on this CD were made live in 2011 at the 25th Warsaw Music Encounters festival. Jerzy Fitelberg's Double Concerto, which received its European first performance at the festival, opens a new window to the solo concerto genre, which has previously been lacking in the series. While Jerzy Fitelberg is already present in the catalogue of eda records with his First Piano Sonata and the Concerto for String Orchestra (eda 19), we expand the circle of composers introduced in 'Poland Abroad' with Spisak and Kassern, whose works enjoy a recognition appropriate to their importance neither in concert life nor on the market for recorded music that is oversaturated with multiple versions of standard repertoire.