The composers featured on this album, despite their individual fates and tragedies, are connected by their strength and courage to express human ideals through music.
Album & Artwork
The album's concept explores how composers Władysław Szpilman, Dmitry Shostakovich, Mieczysław Weinberg, and Sergei Prokofiev faced times of great instability and personal tragedy.
Compositional Technique
Shostakovich's First Piano Sonata is a radical, groundbreaking piece where he broke with 'academic' musical language, destroying the old to make way for something new.
Composition History
Dmitry Shostakovich composed his First Piano Sonata after a deep personal crisis, feeling pressure to find his musical language in the fragile post-revolution Soviet Union.
Composition History
Władysław Szpilman's Mazurek, composed in 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto, was his way to circumvent the prohibition for Jewish artists to play Chopin's music.
Composition History
The autograph of Władysław Szpilman's Suite 'The Life of the Machines' was considered lost, and his son Andrzej received a personal copy of the 1934 Suite in 2000.
Compositional Technique
In his Suite 'The Life of the Machines', Władysław Szpilman reflects on industrialization with humor by musically assigning human adjectives to machines and giving movements titles like 'Machine at rest'.
