Zimmermann与拉特尔、BPO的第一小协，外加布鲁克纳第7：
http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/OperaShare/message/28661这个下载文件里还包括一份programme note，对理解作品很有帮助，转帖如下：
Szymanowski - Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 35 (1916)
Szymanowski wrote the first of his two violin concertos in 1916, during what is usually described as his ‘Impressionist’ period – the time when he really found himself as a composer. Whether or not the label ‘Impressionist’ is appropriate, the sound Szymanowski draws from the orchestra is unique, instantly recognisable. By the standards of the early 20th century, the number of instruments is not remarkable, though they include two harps as well as a piano and several percussion instruments. Yet the effect of spaciousness, rather than weight or loudness, is extraordinary. Szymanowski’s melody and harmony are typical of ‘advanced’ composers of the time in their empirical mix of pentatonic, chromatic, whole-tone and bi-tonal elements (the very opening may owe something to the black-against-white note clashes of Stravinsky’s Petrushka); in fact, Szymanowski seems to be able to do anything he likes while consistently achieving an effect of transparency.
As for the solo part, Szymanowski himself claimed that the style of writing that he developed with the help of his friend, the violinist Pawel Kochanski, created a new mode of expression for the instrument, which can be summarised as ‘ecstatic’. Pitched mostly (though not invariably) very high, it was intended only for the most accomplished players, preferably with a very sweet tone. All its technical devices are collected in the cadenza which Kochanski wrote near the end of the work.
Kochanski was to have given the first performance, with Alexander Siloti conducting, in St Petersburg at the beginning of February 1917: political unrest put paid to th at. In the event, the leader of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, Józef Oziminski, played it, with Emil Mlynarski conducting, in the capital of the new Polish Republic on 1 November 1922. Kochanski introduced it to America, with Leopold Stokowski, in New York and Philadelphia, in 1924.
However dazzling the writing for the violin, the Concerto is not a vehicle for bravura display: the orchestra is used with restraint, and there is no dramatic confrontation or argument; instead, the relationship between soloist and orchestra recalls Chausson’s Poème, written 20 years earlier, though that has a very different expressive character.
Szymanowski took his inspiration for this Concerto from the poem May Night by Tadeusz Micinski:
Asses in crowns settle majestically on the grass –
fireflies are kissing the wild rose –
and Death shimmers on the pond
and plays a frivolous song.
Ephemerids
fly into dance –
oh, flowers of the lakes, Nereids!
Pan plays his pipes in the oak grove.
Ephemerids
fly into dance,
fly into dance –
plaited in amorous embrace
eternally young and holy –
stabbed with a lethal dart.
In the twinkling blue water
golden crucians and roach,
and patient kingfishers
gaze with their eyes of steel –
and on the trees the hammering of the
little blacksmiths,
amid the sorb, red crooked-beaks
and kestrels with eyes like tinder –
merrily whistling and chanting
I fly: here over the water – there under
the trees …
In the woods are glades as if appointed
for these nocturnal revels.
All the birds pay tribute to me,
for today I wed a Goddess …
And now we stand by the lake,
in crimson blossoms,
in flowing tears of joy, with rapture and fear,
burning in amorous conflagrations:
the fire seizes these aged trees
and they shed tears of pitch,
and the familiar gull from the Polar seas
describes a halo over us.
(Translation by Sylvia and Benjamin Shoshan, taken from the BBC Music Guide to Szymanowski by Christopher Palmer, 1983)
The Concerto is in a single movement, though constantly fluctuating – floating, transfixed in reverie, dancing, driven – but never moving towards a goal, for it is all a dream, from the first excited fluttering in the orchestra to the soloist’s final disappearance into the stratosphere. Szymanowski summed up the whole as ‘awfully fantastic and unexpected’. It takes some time for two themes, or rather motifs, to emerge – a swooning sixnote descending phrase, and a grimly emphatic motif of four notes (two descending semitones followed by a rising minor third); these provide a kind of structural scaffolding. Midway occurs a still, sublime moment in which the violin at last reveals its heart then, coming to its senses, gets busy; it’s recalled later, shortly before the cadenza. Surely, Szymanowski intended it all to remain a beautiful mystery.
