Under the category of composers that would have been familiar to our grandparents (or great-grandparents) but are mostly forgotten today falls Ignace Jan Paderewski, touring virtuoso, Polish political activist, and composer of moderate gifts. The varied origins of the old editions used in these performances attest to Paderewski's international popularity; they came from Berlin, Paris, and New York, but not from Poland, where Paderewski was ironically not so well known, at least as a musician. Despite his nationalist ...
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Under the category of composers that would have been familiar to our grandparents (or great-grandparents) but are mostly forgotten today falls Ignace Jan Paderewski, touring virtuoso, Polish political activist, and composer of moderate gifts. The varied origins of the old editions used in these performances attest to Paderewski's international popularity; they came from Berlin, Paris, and New York, but not from Poland, where Paderewski was ironically not so well known, at least as a musician. Despite his nationalist orientation, the songs of Paderewski collected here (dating from the early 1880s to the early 1900s) do not have a strongly Polish flavor. Indeed, not all of them are in the Polish language; half the album consists of settings of French texts, and most of those are by one Catulle Mendès, who set himself the task of imitating other authors such as Germany's Heinrich Heine (which works pretty well) and England's Algernon Charles Swinburne (which is less successful). The songs are a very mixed...
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