KAROL SZYMANOWSKI SHOULD RANK HIGH on anyone’s list of unjustly neglected composers. He started out writing Chopinesque piano pieces, flirted with Straussian exuberance, evolved into something of an Impressionist, and ended up as Poland’s answer to Béla Bartók, infusing his concert works with the complex rhythms and spiky harmonies and intervals of his native land. In the course of his career, Szymanowski wrote about two hours’ worth of violin music, including two concertos and several very individual pieces for violin and piano. As a pianist, Szymanowski was a bit unsure of his ability to write idiomatic violin music, so he enlisted the help of an expert friend, violinist Paul (or Pawel) Kochański. They developed a musical symbiosis equivalent to the Brahms-Joachim partnership, and to explore Szymanowski’s violin music is to learn much about the artistry of Kochański.

Interestingly, neither man was born in Poland.

Szymanowski was born in 1882 in Ukraine, where his parents and other affluent Poles owned land. After music studies in Warsaw, he moved to Berlin and founded a contemporary Polish music society there; as a composer he briefly imitated the surging late-Romantic style of Richard Strauss. A 1914 visit to France sharpened his interest in the Impressionist style. Until then, a traveling pianist-composer, Szymanoski spent the World War I years on his Ukrainian family estate. But between the Bolshevik revolution and Austrian occupation, he was eventually driven to Warsaw, where he developed an individual, rather dissonant, folk-inflected style, and headed the Warsaw Conservatory. Tuberculosis forced him to pass his last years in a Swiss sanatorium. He died in 1937, before reaching middle age.

Kochański was born in Orel, Russia, in 1887 and studied violin in Odessa, where he studied with a Polish student of Leopold Auer. At age 10, Kochański accompanied his teacher to Warsaw, and at 14 was appointed concertmaster of the Warsaw Philharmonic. Two years later, Kochański was studying at the Brussels Conservatory, thus developing a performance style that blended elements of the Russian and Belgian traditions.

Kochański became a noted soloist in his day, warmly praised by such colleagues as Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, and Carl Flesch. Pianist Artur Rubinstein, who strongly advocated Szymanowski’s music, was Kochański’s frequent recital partner. Kochański was a strong supporter of new composers—not just Szymanowski, but also the likes of Bloch and Prokofiev. He immigrated to the United States in 1921, and taught at Juilliard from 1924 until his early death, succumbing to cancer in 1934.

Among his other accomplishments, Kochański was a composer (mainly of small violin pieces) and arranger. He was responsible for the standard violin transcription of Falla’s Siete canciones populares españolas, retitled Suite populaire espagnole, prepared with the participation of the composer. But Kochański’s closest collaboration over the years was with Szymanowski, whom he had met in 1901.

They became good friends, collaborated in recital, and produced a few, choice violin scores together.

The music was Szymanowski’s, but the technical assurance was Kochański’s.

As violinist Tyrone Greive wrote in an article for the Polish Music Journal, “Kochański’s principal contribution to the violin idiom of Szymanowski’s works is usually described as the introduction of the technical means through which the composer-pianist was able to blend his uniquely imaginative conceptions with an idiomatic use of the full virtuoso resources of the violin. The result was the creation of a new type of violin writing, which is in the highest degree refined and exploratory.” Among these collaborations are the Nocturne and Tarantella, Op. 28 (1915); Myths, Op. 30 (1915); and the Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 35 (1916). Note that Szymanowski wrote little further violin-centered music once Kochański moved to America, aside from their work together on the Violin Concerto No. 2, not long before Kochański’s death. However short-lived the partnership may have been, it had a strong impact at the time; Greive, for example, traces strong technical and musical influences from those works to Bartók’s two sonatas for violin and piano and his second violin concerto.

Some of the colorful violin techniques characteristic of Szymanowski’s music from the teens can also be found in Kochański’s own work and his collaborations with other composers. So by learning about Szymanowski’s technical devices, you’re also learning about Kochański’s. Greive has outlined six particular Szymanowski-Kochański fingerprints: the use of different registers (“especially the high E string in order to create a singing quality as well as a dreamy, soaring effect”); harmonics; trills and left-hand tremolos; unusual double-stops; chromatic glissandi (especially combined with trills); and a whole catalog of pizzicati.

HOOKED ON SZYMANOWSKI

The suite Myths may serve as the most comprehensive library of these effects, but perhaps an easier entry point is the “Dance of the Mountaineers” drawn from Szymanowski’s ballet Harnasie. The full, 35-minute ballet, which calls not only for orchestra but also for chorus and tenor soloist, is about a Robin Hood—like band of highland robbers. Their leader abducts a not unwilling young woman just before she weds another man, and spirits her away to the mountains.

The violin-and-piano excerpt that Szymanowski and Kochański prepared eases in with a slow introduction drawn from the ballet’s epilogue. This is disrupted by vigorous music depicting the robbers’ raid. As Greive wrote in the notes accompanying his recording of the piece, “The violin’s many fifths, sometimes jarring multiple stops and other fiddling-like effects as well as unusual melodic patterns, harmonies, and rhythms also reflect Góral mountain folk music, especially as the composer heard it in the playing of his friends, folk fiddler Bartek Obrochta and his ensemble.”

Vincent Skowronski has also recorded the piece; it’s a product of his lifelong infatuation with Szymanowski’s music, starting in 1960 when Skowronski was searching for unusual, fairly modern recital pieces. “I became hooked on this Szymanowski stuff because it was quite good,” he says, “but the drawback is that it needs a gestation period for it to sink in, before you really begin to like it.”

Skowronski, an American of Polish heritage, had difficulty obtaining Szymanowski scores in the 1960s, unless he went to Poland to buy them from the state publishing firm. Things are easier now; in fact, there’s a new Barbara Konarska edition of the “Dance of the Mountaineers” published by PWM Edition and distributed by Theodore Presser Company.

“Szymanowski was a wonderful pianist, but he didn’t know beans about the violin,” Skowronski says. “Thanks to Kochański, this is beautifully written for the instrument.”

Even so, “beautifully written” does not preclude some acerbic harmonies. “Don’t get turned off if you can’t immediately assimilate what Szymanowski is trying to say,” Skowronski advises. “It’s not ugly writing, but it’s difficult. A lot of the writing is very high on the instrument. If you can’t handle that, then you’ve got real problems. You’ve got to have the chops to do it. Once you learn the piece and get to understand the particular style of Kochański, you’ll see that it’s all very well crafted.”

Skowronski warns against problematic rhythm issues. “The piano is often playing against the time, and there’s a tendency for one player to chase the other,” he says. “Rhythmically you’ve got to be rock solid and sure of what you’re doing.

“Then, it’s plain difficult writing. You’ve got to be careful not to be sloppy. There are trills written underneath octaves, and that’s very difficult. If you don’t articulate the trill enough, it sounds god-awful, and at the same time you’ve got to play your octaves in tune.

“There are harmonics involved, and modal things come in and go out. Things that you swear that you practiced that should come out perfectly in tune, somehow sound out of tune because of all the augmented seconds and minor thirds; you’re not really quite sure whether you’re in major or minor, and half the time you’re in neither. When you put that together with the piano part, it’s a stunning effect, but you can still play wrong notes—and it sounds like it. Trilling under the octave makes the octave play out of tune, because the half-step trill makes the overtones get shaken up, and it sounds like bad intonation, even though it’s not. Maybe it’s not supposed to sound in tune. But when you put it together, it works.”