Best-known as a legendary concert pianist and appointed first Prime Minister of Poland in 1919, Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941) also found time to compose. His underrated output includes a fine Piano Concerto from 1888, and a Polish Fantasy for piano and orchestra and a Piano Sonata, both of which date from 1903. That same year, Paderewski embarked on his vast Polonia Symphony, which cost him some five years of labour and was to be his final major creation. First heard privately in Lausanne on Boxing Day, 1908, the symphony received its public premiere in Boston some eight weeks later under Max Fiedler and was soon taken up by both Hans Richter and Andre Messager.
In its unashamedly epic countenance and theatrical sense of rhetoric, Polonia most closely resembles the two symphonies of Liszt as well as Tchaikovsky’s Manfred, though it perhaps lacks the distinctive thematic profile of those masterworks. That said, the mighty opening movement (some half-an-hour in duration) strikes me as an impressive achievement, its stately introductory material sowing the seeds for much of what is to follow as well as acting as a most effective foil to the rousingly patriotic, defiant Allegro vivace proper. As annotator Adrian Thomas astutely observes, there’s more than a hint of Elgar in the surging string writing from 9'10'' and later on at 22'27'' (a reminder, this, that Elgar also composed a piece called Polonia – written in 1915 to raise funds for Polish soldiers who had fought on the Eastern Front, and dedicated to Paderewski), while there are some notably imaginative touches of orchestration, above all the other-worldly, almost malignant sonority of those punctuated chords for three sarrusophones at 19'57'', which are destined to reappear at key points later on.
At first, the central Andante con moto meanders along moodily in an introspective, Rachmaninovian manner, but, about half-way through, the skies darken further and the music acquires a distinctly troubled, sombre flavour that cannot be dispelled (the bleak coda offers no consolation). The finale’s truculent battle-cries (which manage to incorporate a cleverly disguised motif based on the first two bars of the Polish national anthem) are temporarily assuaged by two tranquil episodes, the second of which (beginning at 18'11'') glances wistfully back to the work’s introduction and can boast some particularly radiant string writing. Brassily exuberant fanfares soon follow at 21'40'', bringing with them unexpected pre-echoes of the festive Korngold. Overall, though, this movement does rather outstay its welcome, the tiresomely protracted coda descending into note-spinning long before the end. All the same, I’m certainly glad to have made the acquaintance of Paderewski’s endearing magnum opus, and the more one gets to know this music, the more tolerant one becomes of its relative shortcomings.
The BBC Scottish SO is in really healthy shape these days, and its long-standing Polish chief Jerzy Maksymiuk masterminds a performance of eloquence and dashing commitment (only in the closing minutes does any hint of raggedness creep into the violins’ bustling – and, by the sound of it, none-too-rewarding – passagework). The recording, too, is pretty resplendent, and collectors with a sweet tooth for precisely this sort of heady, late-romantic ‘spectacular’ shouldn’t hesitate for a moment.'