Karol Szymanowski

Karol Szymanowski was born into an aristocratic Polish family in a part of the Russian Empire that is now Ukraine. But although the young Karol travelled extensively (to Berlin and Vienna, as well as the Mediterranean) he studied at the Warsaw Conservatoire at the height of the "Young Poland" movement, and settled in Poland permanently after the family estate was destroyed by the Bolsheviks. After a dalliance with lush late romanticism in his Concert Overture (1905) he refined a style coloured by French impressionism, by a subtle and intensely personal sense of instrumental colour, and by his lifelong fascination with the warmth and sensuality of the Orient and the Mediterranean world – all audible in his Love Songs of Hafiz (1911-14), the Third Symphony ("Song of the Night") (1916) and the widely-played Three Myths for violin and piano (1915), as well as his First Violin Concerto (1916). That sensuality and refinement characterised later works such as the opera King Roger (1924) and the Stabat Mater (1926), but in his post-1918 music he also embraced elements of Polish folk music, giving a new rhythmic bite to works such as the ballet Harnasie (1931) and the Second Violin Concerto (1933) – one of the last works that he completed before his death of tuberculosis in 1937.