KAROL SZYMANOWSKI

Violinist Bomsori and pianist Julia Okruashvili here present a performance of “Roxana’s Song” from Szymanowski’s opera King Roger, completed in 1924. The virtuoso violinist Paul Kochanski, a friend of Szymanowski, created this arrangement of the aria for violin and piano a few years later and it has been a much-loved miniature ever since. In the essentially unaccompanied introduction, Bomsori conjures an eerie atmosphere with orientally inflected writing for the violin’s high register. Julia Okruashvili then adds bell-like accompaniment to a melody that builds through soaring melismas to an ecstatic climax before subsiding and magically fading away into the distance.