Szymanowski: Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3

"The composer's love of exotic colours is exploited to the full by 'home' forces. As he reveals in an interview in this issue, Antoni Wit is one of the world's best-selling conductors, and yet he is very far from the celebrity of an Abbado or a Haitink. Less charismatic than either of those, perhaps, but as he shows here once again he has a exceptional talent for inhabiting a composer's sound world. These are performances of great affection and, typically for Wit, sound totally idiomatic."
(Editor's Choice Gramophone Magazine May 2008)

Composed in 1910, at a time when Szymanowski was influenced by Richard Strauss, Reger and Scriabin, the unusually structured Symphony No. 2 is a work of great power and invention, with many passionate and varied contrasts in its use of solo instruments, in particular the violin. Szymanowski's Symphony No. 3 'Song of the Night', in which orchestra, tenor and choir are subtly blended in a continuous web of intoxicating sound, is a ravishing setting of a Polish translation of a poem by the great medieval Persian mystic known as Mevlânâ, our Master, Jalāl ad-Dīn, which evokes the mysteries and beauty of a starlit Persian night.