“With his profound intelligence and a heart that was forever young and fervent, he understood that, in the history of art, it is only form that changes – and change it must, indefatigably following the complex paths of human development. The essential content, however, always remains the same. It is a content born of the sense of life’s depth and mystery, through relentless and dedicated work, in the name of a selfless ideal.”

Karol Szymanowski wrote these words about his elder friend and colleague, with whom he shared the same space of values as well as long and frequent conversations. They had similar views on that vital and life-giving current in art that shunned fashionable formal and stylistic boundaries. This album, dedicated in its entirety to the music of one composer who falls outside any rankings of progress in music composition, and whose works bear witness to the genuine nobility and cheerful nature of his spirit – is an unquestionable achievement of one of Poland’s most outstanding pianists, Magdalena Lisak. The artist has biographical links to the composer, since Lisak’s grandfather Zbigniew Dymmek, a distinguished pianist, conductor, and composer once attended Roman Statkowski’s class at Warsaw’s Conservatory. Lisak restores to present-day repertoires the output of a composer who has unfairly been relegated to the margins of Polish music history.

Statkowski wrote piano pieces throughout his life, starting with the period of his studies in Poland. 1882 saw his debut in this field, the mazurs for piano published in the Echo Muzyczne bi-weekly. A large proportion of his piano works (mainly sentimental pieces with salon-style titles such as Valse triste, Fariboles, etc.) was composed in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. He continued to write for the piano in his Warsaw years, till the end of his life (1925), as a kind of substitute for his unfulfilled operatic ambitions. Already his Moscow compositions demonstrated, as Stanisław Niewiadomski concluded, “an excellent knowledge of the instrument”. Though Statkowski never envisaged himself as a concert pianist, he did take piano lessons with the highly regarded pianist and music critic Antoni Sygietyński, professor of the Music Institute, who had been a pupil of Rudolf Strobl and Carl Reinecke. It was probably in that period that he became acquainted with a number of issues which make his piano works so perfectly suited for that instrument. Statkowski composed for the piano in a way that truly reflected the instrument’s complete technical and expressive spectrum, which made his music ideally tailored to the skills and needs of a pianist. The formal perfection of his miniatures, nobility of style, simple and sincere expression – were emphasised by critics from the very beginning, ever since he published his first opuses for the piano. His melodies, as Józef Reiss pointed out, are tuned to a profound expression of feelings, often pensive in a melancholy fashion, but invariably refined in their mellifluous lines and framed in delicate harmonies. It is the spirit of Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Moritz Moszkowski (particularly his models of counterpoint), and the Russian Romantics that speaks through Statkowski’s piano music.