ANAKLASIS / katalog / Portraits / ANA 003

Born in 1907 in Podolia (now Ukraine), educated in Lviv and Warsaw, Roman Palester emigrated from Poland soon after WWII. He died in Paris in 1989. For many years he headed the cultural department of Radio Free Europe’s Polish section. Though in the period between the two world wars he did make a commercial success (with songs such as Oh, Those Women sung by Eugeniusz Bodo), he had to wait many long years for his ‘serious’ musical output to win recognition in his own country. Under communism, his works were banned from performance in Poland for a long period. Palester went a long way from neoclassicism to dodecaphony to serialism. The compositions collected on this CD represent the earliest period of his work. The concertinos (Palester also considered his Serenade as one of them) differed from concertos not just in their more modest dimensions, but also by being lighter in character. Inspirations for them were drawn from radically different sources. The Concertino for Alto Saxophone and Strings resulted from the composer’s admiration for the virtuoso skills of Sigurd Raschèr (who unfortunately did not eventually have an opportunity to perform it), while the one for harpsichord draws on dances collected in the 16th century by Jan of Lublin.