For its new recording project, the Warsaw Philharmonic, with its music and artistic director Andrzej Boreyko, invited the Polish cello virtuoso Marcin Zdunik. On Polish Music for Cello and Orchestra, the artists present four compositions: Aleksander Tansman’s Fantasy for cello and orchestra, Grazyna Bacewicz’s First Cello Concerto, Henryk Hubertus Jablonski’s C-67 and Milosz Magin’s Cello Concerto. What do the four works for solo instrument and orchestra chosen for this recording have in common, besides the cello, that most soulful of instruments that in the hands of a virtuoso can make us hold our breath in anticipation of each note to come? Well, they are also linked by the fact that they were written by composers of Polish origins who lived during the twentieth century, most of them born in the same city, Lódz (except for Henryk Hubertus Jablonski, associated personally and professionally with Gdansk).

In some of the works, we also hear distinct and intentional inspirations from Polish traditional music. In this interesting selection, we have both works by distinctly recognisable artists – Grazyna Bacewicz and Aleksander Tansman – and also less frequently performed compositions by Jablonski and Milosz Magin, which certainly deserve our attention. All four composers present a common front with regard to musical traditions: they see both a need for their continuation and a need to update and transform the means shaped by those traditions. Although they represented different aesthetic outlooks and wrote in different styles, they all tackled the most important problem of twentieth-century music: relating to the past while looking to the future. In music, those two contrasting notions – tradition and innovation – have proved impossible to reconcile. Each of our composers turned to traditional forms and major–minor tonality in a different way, in order to find a bridge between modern composition techniques and listeners’ perceptual capacities and habits.