Szymanowski: Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 36

“Anderszewski out-classes his rivals in his Szymanowski recital” BBC Music Magazine, Proms Issue 2005

“Here Anderszewski turns his attention away from well-tried classics of the repertoire to Szymanowski and to 'an aura of extreme fin de siècle opulence' (John Ogdon). Szymanowski's neurotically questing imagination was fired by his travels in Africa and the Mediterranean; and leaving earlier influences of Chopin (the Op 1 Preludes) and a lengthy dalliance with Reger and Richard Strauss (the Second Piano Sonata) far behind, he turned to impressionism, to Debussy and the glittering, mosaic-like structures he inherited from Scriabin.
Yet despite such influences his music achieves a unique fragrance and character and both Masques and Métopes shed a new and scintillating light on the myths of ancient Greece. Such music calls for a pianist of unlimited, superfine virtuosity and a complete temperamental affinity for such exoticism, and in Anderszewski it has surely found its ideal champion. Under his astonishing mind and fingers the chains of trills at the climax of 'Schéhérazade' take on an incandescence that transcends their Scriabinesque origins and Anderszewski's razor-sharp clarity and stylistic assurance make you hang on every one of the composer's teeming notes.
Here and in Métopes every hyper-nervous fluctuation of mood is judged to an uncanny perfection and in the Third Sonata, where Szymanowski returns from his richly programmatic sources to a more objective if no less intricate utterance, every aspect of the music's refined and energetic life is held in a blazing light from which it is impossible to escape. Visceral and superhuman, all these performances have been superbly recorded.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Roland Pöntinen's generously filled and beautifully engineered recital features three of Szymanowski's most exotic and harmonically daring middle-period works together with a handful of Mazurkas that were composed near the end of his life. The Swedish pianist gives very persuasive accounts of these later more emotionally restrained pieces projecting their melodic lines with great sensitivity without disrupting their natural dance-like flow.” BBC Music Magazine, April 2009 ****

“…Martin Roscoe has compiled a programme that serves to underline the composer's extraordinary journey from conventional late-Romanticism via the complex and almost mystic impressionism of the Third Sonata to the quasi-Bartókian absorption of Polish folk idioms in the late Mazurkas. Needless to say he has the full measure of these different styles, providing a beautifully velvet sound in the largely contemplative Op. 1 Preludes and effecting a considerable diversity of character and touch in the Variations in B flat minor.” BBC Music Magazine, January 2006 ****