• 2002, March 31 muziek voor van Zoelen (coloratura) for bass saxophone & electronics; Andreas van Zoelen; Hervormde Kerk, Oisterwijk, The Netherlands
• 2002, March 29 Ave verum corpus for mixed choir; Robertson-Wesley United Church Choir; Stillman Matheson (cond.); Robertson-Wesley United Church, Edmonton, AB
• 2002, March 9 Numen version for clarinet & piano; Katarzyna Marczak, clarinet; Slawomir Kokosza, piano (members of the Ara Ensemble); Florianka concert hall (Jagiellonian University), Kraków, Poland (Write & Play Festival and Seminar)
• 2002, March 7 Lachrymae (in Memory of September 11, 2001) for organ; Carson P. Cooman; Rochester Christian Reformed Church, Rochester, N.Y.
• 2002, February 20 Walzer (für Joseph Matthias Hauer) for piano; Gabriela Szendzielorz, piano; Wroclaw, Poland (Musica Polonica Nova Festival)
• 2002, February 3 Orion (Music for Franz K.) for saxophone & electronics; Jennifer Wardle, saxophone; Toronto, ON (earshot concerts)
• 2002, February 2 Credo for orchestra; Scarborough Philharmonic, Jerome David Summers (cond.); Scarborough, ON
• 2001, December 2 zapada zmrok (it.s getting dark) . Giacinto Scelsi in memoriam for chamber ensemble; Onyx Wind Quintet & John Kameel Farah, piano; Toronto, ON (earshot concerts)
• 2001, November 19 Strumienie snu (Streams of a Dream) for string quartet; The Penderecki String Quartet; Toronto, ON (NuMusFest) Composed in 1995 especially for the Penderecki [String Quartet], Grella-Mozejko's String Quartet No. 1, subtitled Strumienie snu (Polish for Streams of a Dream), emerged as a strikingly individual sounding piece by virtue of its primarily soft dynamics and hyper-active textures of whispery high harmonics and double stops. A veritable beehive of activity, the music demanded playing of intense concentration and careful calculation and this is exactly what it received from the Waterloo-based foursome. William Littler (The Toronto Star).
• 2001, October 28 Voces intimć (Music for David Roxburgh) for chamber ensemble; The Roxburgh Memorial Ensemble, George Andrix (leader); Edmonton, AB
• 2001, October 20 Voces intimć (Music for David Roxburgh) for chamber ensemble; Hermes Ensemble, Koen Kessels (cond.); Antwerp (Flanders Festival)

The Penderecki String Quartet performed at the Skalny Lecture and Artist Series at Kilbourn Hall of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester on 17 March. The quartet is currently featuring one of Szymanowski's two string quartets.

ON THE WEST COAST

International Chopin Competition winner Lang Lang included the music of Chopin in his recital on 10 March at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido, California.

GORECKI AND CHOPIN IN POLAND

Born in Bydgoszcz in 1949, raised in the medieval city of Torun and educated at the Warsaw State Higher School of Music (today's Chopin Music Academy), for the past 25 years the distinguished and award-winning composer Piotr Moss has been dividing his time between two cities which he calls home: Paris and Warsaw. Next month Mr. Moss celebrates his 30th anniversary as an artist.

Joseph A. Herter: How did the sharing of your life between two European capitals come about?

Piotr Moss: It's almost as though I had been predestined to go to Paris. My professor at the Warsaw Academy Piotr Perkowski (1901-1990), who had studied with Karol Szymanowski in Paris, kept telling me that I must go and continue my studies in Paris after I finish my studies in Warsaw. And, thanks to a French Government Scholarship, I became the last Pole to study with the legendary Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979).

JH: What was Nadia Boulanger like as teacher?

PM: When I went to study in Paris, Boulanger was almost completely blind. Lessons would consist of my playing my own compositions for her at the piano and then listening to her criticisms and suggestions. Since I was already a trained composer, much of our lesson time would be spent talking about music, especially about musical aesthetics. Boulanger believed that the ability to compose was a gift from God and that the composer in humility gave thanks for this divine gift by composing. Following my studies with Boulanger in 1977, I received the award named for Boulanger's younger sister, Prix de l' Association des amis de Lili Boulanger.

JH: Where do you find the most success with your music - in France or in Poland?

PM: I have to say that my work as a composer is quite different in Paris than it is in Warsaw. In Paris, I am better known as a composer of "classical" music. While in Warsaw, though, I'm known better as a "commercial" composer for the music I write for the radio, television, theater and documentary films. My activity as a composer, though, is not just limited to these two countries. I have been very successful with my music in Germany as well, where my Meditations und Psalm was recently performed in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall for the 100th anniversary of the Berliner Sängerbund.

JH: When martial law was declared in Poland, you were in Paris. How long did you stay there before you returned to Poland, and did you make any musical statements to reflect the political situation in your native land?

PM: Martial law certainly had an effect on my life, but more of a personal effect rather than a musical one. In Warsaw, I was always getting commissions to write pieces. In Paris, I suddenly had a crisis to face - that of starting life anew. It was I who had to go around knocking on doors to see if I could write anything for anybody. I was there for ten years before I came back to Poland. I really didn't make any political statements in my music during martial law. However, you could say the shock of its declaration did show its way both dramatically and intimately in my Cello Sonata which I was writing at that time.

JH: Was it hard to get back into the Warsaw musical scene once you returned?

PM: Yes and no. I never lost my contacts in Warsaw, but finding a free place in the business upon my return was difficult. The troubles I had when I returned, though, were the same ones that my colleagues who stayed in Warsaw were having: finding work. In democratic Poland, music no longer played the same role in society as did under the Communists and so there was no longer the same amount of money allotted to the budgets of musical institutions which once flourished under the old system.

JH: What compositions are you currently working on?

PM: At the moment I am working on pieces to be performed in both Paris and Warsaw. For example, I am writing the music to a documentary film about the writer Tadeusz Konwicki, directed by Andrzej Titkow. Also, there's a new work for four French horns and electronic sounds, and I'm making sketches for a new piano concerto that will be called Portraits and premiered in Slupsk at The Polish Pianistic Festival in 2003. I'm also writing a Stabat Mater for mezzo-soprano and eight cellos for the Cello Festival in Beauvais as well as a symphony with choir for the Festival Paris de la Musique. And there's also an oratorio that I'm writing for the French City of Lille, which will be named the Cultural Capital of Europe for the year 2004.

JH: Where in Warsaw can we hear your music performed in the near future?

PM: On April 12 and 13, my orchestral piece Fresque will have its Polish premiere with the Warsaw Philharmonic with Tomasz Bugaj conducting. This is the piece which had its world premiere in Paris with the Orchestre National de France, Leonard Slatkin conducting. Also, on May 15, at the Lutoslawski Studio at Polish Radio on Woronicza Street there'll be the world premiere of my solo cantata Dzien - Noc (Day -Night) which was commissioned by the station Polish Radio II. It's set to the poetry of futuristic Polish poets and will be performed by Jadwiga Rappé and the Polish Radio Orchestra, conducted by Krzysztof Slowinski. Should you be in the vicinity of the Indian Ocean in July, however, the French island of La Réunion will be the venue for the world premiere of my Suite LA that's based on Latin American dance music. A youth orchestra of 700 musicians (!) from all over the Indian Ocean islands will give its first performance.

NOTE: This interview first appeared in the April 2002 issue of Warszawa - What, When, Where."

The letter was written by one Hippolyte Sot, resident of the area in the 1840s. The letter described the techniques he had devised to record audio sounds using a glass cylinder. It went on to say that despite his efforts he was unable to obtain any interest nor recognition for his work. He therefore buried the details of this invention in the metal box along with one sample recording. The recording was none other than

The magazine says that the recording was made about 20 years earlier the those created by Leon Scott, the person normally attributed with the invention of audio recording. It also gives additional detail about the inventor and how the information was retrieved from the glass cylinder. And what's particularly interesting is that H. Sot had NOT invented a playback technique, and it took 20th century technology to recover the audio information recorded on the cylinder.

To get all the details, get a copy of the latest issue of CLASSIC CD magazine. And yes, the CD included with the magazine includes the recording. Its the only recording of Frederich Chopin, and he displays some pretty fantastic playing ability.

That the text above is a hoax you may find out from the following rebuttal:

"The recording of Chopin performing the "Minute Waltz" is a now world-famous musical hoax that was equisitely executed by the editors of a music magazine devoted to reviews of classical CD's about four-or-five years ago. To be precise, the hoax appeared on a CD that was sent as a free gift to all subscribers of the magazine, arriving with the April issue on April 1.

Now in hindsight, it is easy for those who never heard the CD or read the accompanying "historical" material to laugh at the obvious falsity of the "discovery." However, this hoax was so meticulously researched (it was based on a great deal of esoteric historical evidence that was in fact true)--and the recording itself was so brilliantly faked--that many musicians and musical experts were taken in, at least initially. I first heard the recording broadcast on the radio on the day it appeared. It introduced with great fanfare by an announcer who read about 15 minutes worth of the liner notes, and who called the recording "the musical equivalent of the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankamen." Was I fooled? Absolutely!

The original recording was not claimed to have been made on a cylinder. The basis of the hoax was Sot's experiments in recording sound on disks of glass covered with smoke. His experiments were amazing for their time. He understood the relationship of sound to the wavy lines traced on smoked glass with a diaphragm and a cactus needle. And evidently it was he who first came up with the idea of inscribing sound on a rotating disc--decades before Emil Berliner and Charles Cros were to patent their techniques. However, Sot never got beyond the inscribing stage; he could not figure out a way to play back the vibrations he had inscribed on the smoked glass disks.

The magazine's hoax took it from there, claiming that Sot had buried one of his smoke-covered disks in a sealed glass container in the hope that some day in the future science would have by then figured out a way to play back his precious vibrations. They claimed that the container had been recovered during a subway excavation at Nohant-sur-Seine (near Georges Sand's chateau), and that the sound had been reproduced and transfered by a prestigious French national scientific laboratory using optical lasers and digital conversion techniques.

Moreover, Sot was indeed a neighbor and acquaintance of Georges Sand during the period of her long affair (menage) with Chopin. What could be more natural than for him to have prevailed upon one of the world's two most famous living pianists who just happened to be living next door to play a little something for posterity?

The recording is absolutely fabulous!. First, what little musical sound that is audible is almost entirely covered by a loud continual banging, crashing, gritty surface noise of a kind one has never heard before--ostensibly the pits in the surface of the glass disk. Far in the distance, one can barely hear the tiny but very clear sound of a piano, playing the Minute Waltz from start to finish (in the correct key, of course.)

The most amazing thing about the performance is the tempo--which is insanely fast. Indeed, the piece is played in less than a minute. (BTW, I have read-- elsewhere--that the only pianist to have ever recorded the Minute Waltz in a minute was Liberace--even though the French word "Minute" did not here refer to a minute, but rather 'minute' as in small.) In any event, it is indeed humanly possible to play the piece at that speed. And if not Chopin, who then?"

NOTE: This news item was submitted to us by Dr. Barbara Milewski, a noted Chopin specialist, in response to a request from one of our readers who thought that an original chopin CD may actually exist.

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