Tansman: Symphonies. Volume 3 (SACD)

Born in 1897 to an affluent Jewish family in Łódz´, Alexandre Tansman left Poland for Paris at the age of twenty, after winning three prizes at the first competition for composers organised in the newly independent country. A protégé of Ravel – cosmopolitan, erudite and charming – he soon became an important guest at Parisian artistic salons:

 We would get together, make music, and meet people from around the world. […] There was no division between generations. I was very close friends with people much older than me, such as Ravel, Roussel, Schmitt, later Stravinsky, as well as those of my generation, such as Les Six, and even younger composers. Festival of Venice. His rise to fame was meteoric. Commissions by – and European performances with – Koussevitzky (two piano concertos, of 1925 and 1927) were followed by a concert tour of the U.S. in 1927– 28. Tansman was the soloist in the Second Piano Concerto, dedicated to Charlie Chaplin who was present during the performance given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. A tour of the world followed in 1932 –33, Tansman visiting India, Japan, China, the Philippines, Java and Bali. He played for Gandhi and the Emperor of Japan. His music appeared in the repertoire of the most famous performers of his time, including the conductors Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy and Walter Damrosch, the pianist Artur Rubinstein, violinist Jascha Heifetz, cellist Pablo Casals, and guitarist Andrés Segovia. With exceptional conductors as champions of his music, Tansman quickly reached international prominence. In fact, when Karol Szymanowski and George Gershwin came to Paris, it was Tansman who introduced them to his friends and who arranged for concerts and reviews of their compositions

Introduced to leading contemporary conductors, Tansman focused his compositional activities of the 1920s and 1930s on symphonic music, which was featured in concert series by Vladimir Golschmann and Serge Koussevitzky, as well as in other avant-garde music contexts, such as events of the Société musicale indépendante in Paris and the