All but unknown when Stanislaw Wislocki first recorded his music in 1965, shadowy composer Mieczyslaw Karlowicz has emerged as the major voice in Polish orchestral music before Karol Szymanowski on the basis of only about a dozen works. Naxos' Symphonic Poems 2, featuring the New Zealand Symphony under conductor Antoni Wit, combines three of the best orchestral pieces Karlowicz produced, the symphonic poems Returning Waves (1904), A Sorrowful Tale (1908), and Eternal Songs (1906), the last-named being a multi-movement ...
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All but unknown when Stanislaw Wislocki first recorded his music in 1965, shadowy composer Mieczyslaw Karlowicz has emerged as the major voice in Polish orchestral music before Karol Szymanowski on the basis of only about a dozen works. Naxos' Symphonic Poems 2, featuring the New Zealand Symphony under conductor Antoni Wit, combines three of the best orchestral pieces Karlowicz produced, the symphonic poems Returning Waves (1904), A Sorrowful Tale (1908), and Eternal Songs (1906), the last-named being a multi-movement composition more like a short symphony that has become among his most popular creations. These recordings are not recycled from Marco Polo; they were recorded in 2006 for the main Naxos label, and the disc also includes a prompt for a free bonus download track. The sound quality is terrific, and so are the performances. The strings at the end of "Song of Love and Death" (the second movement of Eternal Songs) seems to shimmer upward into the stratosphere and vanish at the movement's...
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