Music

Sinae Lee

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

four stars

WHAT is the problem with Szymanowski’s music? Despite consistent championship of the Polish composer’s music, not least by musicians of the calibre and persuasive power of Nicola Benedetti and others in Szymanowski’s Violin Concertos, numerous conductors who have devoted attention to his motley symphonies, groups such as the Royal Quartet who have searched deep into his string quartets, and the magnificent Korean pianist Sinae Lee, who has recorded his entire output for piano on four CDs and who, on Friday, gave an astounding account of a ripe selection of his piano music in the Royal Conservatoire, fame, the real fame that is signalled by a constant presence in the mainstream repertoire, continues frustratingly to elude the music and the man who is, arguably, Poland’s greatest composer since Chopin.

True, the music can be harmonically rich and complex in its textures, but as Sinae Lee demonstrated in four of Szymanowski’s late Mazurkas, the roots of the dance form are there to be heard, providing a link to the familiar. And Lee’s glittering account of the 12 opus 3 Studies, despite the fantastic embroidering of melodic lines and the blurring of some of the boundaries between individual numbers, was no more forbidding than any other high-speed musical portraiture that might usefully bear the name of Impressionism. The brilliant Korean’s big-boned, red-blooded and rafter-raising performance of Szymanowski’s Second Sonata was quite simply a stonking version of a good old-fashioned Romantic warhorse. I’m not entirely convinced by the dramatic fugue in the finale, which barges into the proceedings, but it doesn’t half sweep you along.