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Alexandre Tansman - 8 Kantylen 1949 Pianist: Eliane Reyes 0:00 - I. Prelude: Largo 2:13 - II. Arioso: Adagio cantabile 4:59 - III. Interlude: Andante tranquillo 6:20 - IV. Choral I: Lento 8:47 - V. Invention: Andante sostenuto 9:50 - VI. Choral II: Adagio cantabile 12:19 - VII. Fugue: Andante cantabile 15:29 - VIII. Postlude: Largo One of the earliest neoclassicists, a conductor, a pianist, and a friend to famous figures from Charlie Chaplin to Thomas Mann, Alexandre Tansman (1897-1986) boasted one of the most internationally successful careers in music enjoyed by a Polish composer. He studied first with Wojciech Gawroński and later with Paderewski, Melcer-Szczawiński, and Birnbaum, but as he advanced further and further into his musical life, he began to draw influence from Dukas, Roussel, Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, and, perhaps most centrally, Ravel. Musically, Tansman effectively departs from the programmatic trend of late-romanticism, but he described himself as a fundamentally Polish composer, using Polish folk forms and imitating the spirit of folk melodies. Otherwise, Tansman’s musical language dodges easy melodies and pre-conceived musical associations to bring the listener to new spaces rich with unique figurations that express music’s peerless ability to interface with pure abstraction without concretizing it. In terms of achieving the goals of neoclassicism, Tansman consistently sought a new classical framework without adhering to the dogmatics of the artistic movement emerging as a result of the cultural pendulum swinging away from the concrete, the hyperbolic, and the emotional. Rather, Tansman built his own neoclassical style by removing the extra-musical and seeking to allow music to do what it is best at and to be what it most truly is.
