War Poems: Szymanowski, Chopin, Narodytska, Shostakovich, Liakhovych (Somm)

★★★★☆

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I am generally resistant to albums that impose an external theme on unrelated pieces of music from different places and times. In this case, it is eastern Europe, 1814 to 2024.

You’d be hard pressed to justify Karel Szymanowski’s Masques of 1915 as war poems, the more so when its named themes are Scheherezade, Tantris and Don Juan, and the composer never entered uniform. Chopin’s two Polonaises opus 40 are likewise hardly militaristic, no matter how hard the pianist Maria Narodytska tries to rally her fingers and how dark she colours the bass line.

This album comes into its own with the present Ukraine war — a minimalist meditation, After by the Kyiv-born Narodytska, followed by a really substantial War Notebook by her compatriot Artem Liakhovych. This set of cultural aphorisms quotes anyone from JS Bach and Frederic Chopin to the people of Uman, a place of saints and visions. The randomness of reference is itself indicative of the way fragments of music enter our consciousness in time and place of war.

Narodytska plays the pieces with an empathy that stays just on the right side of hyperintense. Her closing piece is the second sonata of Dmitri Shostakovich and suddenly the whole album makes sense. Shostakovich in 1943 said everything in that bleak sonata that he could not put into words. Only music can describe the human condition under such stress.

Maria Narodytska’s approach is impeccable, the album cover arresting.

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Norman Lebrecht

Norman Lebrecht is one of the most widely-read commentators on music, culture and cultural politics. He is a regular presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and other publications. His blog, Slipped Disc, is among the most widely read cultural sites online, breaking exclusive stories and campaigning against human abuse and acts of injustice in the cultural industries.

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