GREAT RECORDINGS phase 16

SZYMANOWSKI: Stabat Mater · Litany To The Virgin Mary
SYMPHONY No.3 ‘Song of the Night’
Elzbieta Szmytka · Florence Quivar · John Connell
Jon Garrison · CBSO Chorus
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Simon Rattle

3 61592 2 (Angel: 3 61593 2)
Recorded 1993
Stereo/DDD
56 minutes

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‘One of the most beautiful Szymanowski recordings that I’ve encountered and Rattle’s insistence that all of the music be heard, its urgency and passion as well as its deliquescent loveliness, makes for uncommonly gripping Szymanowski as well. The recording is outstanding: lucid, rich and spacious.’ (The Gramophone)
Gramophone Award, UK

Simon Rattle began to programme Szymanowski’s music – with the glorious setting of the Stabat Mater – as early as 1981, at the start of his 18 years with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. In time, and with the full support of EMI, he added more major Szymanowski works to his Birmingham repertoire and to his discography.

The music of Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937) draws both on exoticism and a Romantic opulence in works like the Third Symphony, the opera King Roger and the First Violin Concerto, and also on a much simpler and more Polish tradition in the Stabat Mater and the Litany.

For his first CD, reissued here, Rattle chose to juxtapose the symphony, a celebration of the beauty and mystery of an eastern night, with the two much later sacred works. The critical and commercial success of this disc was followed by Simon Rattle’s equally acclaimed recordings of Szymanowski’s King Roger, the two violin concertos and the Symphony No.4.