Harnasie / Mandragora / Prince Potemkin: Incidental Music

BBC Music Magazine - Orchestral Choice of the Month April 2009

"The latest addition to Naxos's series devoted to Szymanowski's orchestral works seems workaday and drab, especially compared with the version of the main work here, the "ballet-pantomime" Harnasie, which was one of Simon Rattle's last recordings with the City of Birmingham SO. Completed in 1931, Harnasie is perhaps the most important of Szymanowski's late works, crammed with the folk material he had collected in the Tatra mountains, as well as betraying a debt to Stravinsky's great ballets. The Polish performance under Antoni Wit is efficient without being refined, though the other two works here - the pantomime Mandragora, and the 10 minutes of incidental music written for a play in 1925 - have rarity value." The Guardian, 27th February 2009 ***

"There are fine recordings of Harnasie in the current catalogue including an exciting performance from Rattle and the CBSO on EMI. This new versions from Antoni Wit… enjoys the benefit of equally outstanding sound but boasts a more idiomatic interpretation with a particularly earthy performance from tenor Wieslaw Ochman and the Warsaw Philharmonic Choir. The couplings are no less fascinating. Both works are delivered here in authoritative performances - a marvellous addition to this much-praised Szymanowski series." BBC Music Magazine, April 2009 *****

"…Harnasie has a very personal, Polish aura to it, well projected in this robust yet technically secure account by Antoni Wit and his Warsaw forces, including brief contributions from the veteran yet still strong-voiced Wieslaw Ochman." Gramophone Magazine, June 2009

Multiple prize-winner and Grammy award nominee for several of his Naxos recordings, Antoni Wit is one of today's most highly regarded Polish conductors, an ideal interpreter of the exotic, colourfully scored music of Karol Szymanowski, described by Sir Simon Rattle as "one of the greatest composers of this century". The ballet-pantomime Harnasie and the incidental music for Prince Potemkin both draw on the folk-music of the people of the Tatra Mountains, while the ballet Mandragora was composed for a production of Molière's comedy Le bourgeois gentilhomme.