Tadeusz Baird

condition (records/cover): NM / EX- (minimal wear)

In 1944, aged sixteen, Tadeusz Baird was deported from Poland to Germany as forced labour. After a failed escape he was imprisoned in a concentration camp until liberation by the Americans, spending the following months recovering in a military hospital before returning to Warsaw to study music. This biographical fact is not incidental to his music. It explains something essential about the darkness that runs through even his most lyrical work - the sense of beauty maintained under pressure, of a melody that knows what surrounds it.

This LP brings together three pivotal works from across his career. Four Love Sonnets (1956) sets Shakespeare in Polish translation - a baritone voice over chamber orchestra, aching and transparent, the modernist syntax dissolved by the gravitational pull of melody. It remained the work he was most closely associated with. Goethe-Briefe (1970), a cantata for baritone, chorus, and orchestra setting texts by Goethe and Charlotte von Stein, was, by Baird's own account, the first large work he could be proud of. And Concerto Lugubre (1975), written in memory of his mother, is the most structurally concentrated of the three: a viola concerto in which the solo voice moves through dramatic, elegiac, and violently aggressive terrain before retreating into silence. "Baird," wrote one commentator, "presents the solo protagonist against swirling orchestral chaos and bleak desolation." He died in 1981, aged 53, leaving a body of work that has never found the audience it deserves.

Conducted by Jacek Kasprzyk and Jan Krenz, with violist Stefan Kamasa. Polish Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra of Kraków. Original Muza pressing.