Here’s a piece I *inadvertently* premiered back in 2018.

Etude no. 2, from Roman Palester’s ten etudes (1979-81).

“I was born in a place and in a world that no longer exists. Maybe they never existed.” The Polish composer Roman Palester (1907-89) wrote these words in the middle of the 1980s in Galicia, Austria, the Poland of his childhood only a distant memory. During the 20s and 30s, Palester belonged to a new group of Polish composers who saw Paris as the place to cut one’s teeth and to make one’s artistic career. His first works from this period are neoclassical in attitude, tinged with folkloric rhythms and motifs. Despite his Jewish origins (as defined by the Nazis), and a period of six weeks spent in the notoriously brutal Pawiak prison, he emerged after the second World War as the preëminent talent of his generation, a “successor to Szymanowski,” as one colleague put it. But his move to Paris in 1949, a result of the Communist takeover in Poland that sought to stifle Western influence, led to his being dropped by the Polish composers’ unions and societies, and censors blacklisted his works in Poland through 1977. So, from 1952-70, he worked as director of the cultural section in the Polish division of Radio Free Europe in Munich. In the years after his retirement from this position, he rediscovered the piano, with its simultaneous possibilities for resonance and complex polyphony, as a medium for expression with new gestural possibilities. The ten etudes (1979-81) alternate between virtuosic etudes of high textural density and spacious, concentrated entries—quasi improvisado—that demand highly refined musical instincts.”

Big h/t musicologist J. Mackenzie Pierce for his archival research and for introducing me to this composer’s works.