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Simon Laks: Complete works for voice and piano

Ania Vegry (soprano), Katarzyna Wasiak (piano)

Awards:

Almost every track in this extensively annotated and superbly performed two-disc set demonstrates Laks’s special gift for capturing the emotional essence of the poetry to which he felt the closest...

Simon Laks: Complete works for voice and piano

Ania Vegry (soprano), Katarzyna Wasiak (piano)

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This release includes a digital booklet

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Awards:

Almost every track in this extensively annotated and superbly performed two-disc set demonstrates Laks’s special gift for capturing the emotional essence of the poetry to which he felt the closest...

About

Simon Laks (1901–1983) belonged to the group of young Polish musicians who, encouraged by Paderewski and Szymanowski, pursued careers in Paris of the interwar period. Due to his Jewish descent, he was deported in 1942 to Auschwitz, where he was able to survive as director of a camp orchestra in Birkenau. Long known primarily for the account of his survival, Music of Another World, his compositions, too, have meanwhile attracted international attention. This double‐CD presents all of the composer’s existing songs and melodramas, largely in first recordings. Owing to the outstanding quality of the music as well as of the Polish and French texts, but above all against the background of the experiences that flowed into them and make them a testimony to deeply moving humanism, these works deserve a special place in the musical history of the twentieth century.

Contents and tracklist

Awards and reviews

  • BBC Music Magazine
    September 2021
    Choral & Song Choice

September 2021

Almost every track in this extensively annotated and superbly performed two-disc set demonstrates Laks’s special gift for capturing the emotional essence of the poetry to which he felt the closest affinity and clothing it with idiomatic vocal writing and instantly evocative piano accompaniments.

Nov/Dec 2022

Vegry has a bright, focused lyric soprano and displays the ability to convey the wide range of emotions in Laks’s songs. Wasiak plays with real character. Well-balanced, natural recorded sound completes the picture. This release preserves an important body of work by a composer who does not deserve the neglect he has suffered until recently. Warmly recommended.
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