Józef Swider: Music For Wind Instruments

Grochowska, Maria; Pyc, Piotr; Knapik, Eugenius; Palacz, Wanda; Widaszek, Roman; Zietek, Mariusz; Baranski, Marek

In Polish music the name of Józef Swider has been strictly connected with choral music, though the composer wrote 3 operas, a number of oratorian-cantata works, 9 masses, numerous songs and more than 80 instrumental pieces of music, about 20 of them for wind instruments. Many of the last were composed especially for the definite performers – outstanding musicians of Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra (previously WOSPR) and the Silesian Philharmonic, being at the same time lecturers of Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice (previously the State Higher School of Music in Katowice), and privately composer’s friends. The graduate of professor Boleslaw Woytowicz’s composition class at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice (diploma in 1955) contrary to his friends of his graduating class: Henryk Mikolaj Górecki, Wojciech Kilar or a bit older Witold Szalonek, he never flirted with musical avant-garde – the same he was saved from the difficult return journey ‘towards himself’. A Romantic by nature but with a strong desire of classical order Swider remained faithful to the idiom of musical Neoclassicism with romantic-lyric shade, however which was sometimes the starting point for some outstanding excursions and frequently took a surprising shape. Jolanta Szulakowska-Kulawik in her monography of composer’s artistic output described Swider’s music pointedly as ‘music in waiting for Post modernism’. Just like that: not ‘Postmodern music’ but ‘music in waiting for Post-modernism’. Only today in times of ‘post modernity’ – having the perspective of such penurious ‘achievements’ of the avant-garde Modernist art – we can properly perceive the taste of music created in harmony with ‘being’. This is the outstanding hommage: another generation of Silesian musicians – among them graduates of the already mentioned ‘jolly good fellows’ – presents the collection of chamber music pieces of Józef Swider.

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