Personally I love this weather, but if the early morning autumn chill makes you long for summer nights that make your head feel like it is stuck in a pressure cooker, then maybe you should put on some Karol Szymanowski.
Szymanowski, probably the most celebrated Polish composer to have lived between Chopin and Lutoslawski, rode Hokusai’s wave of Impressionism clear into the Tatras highlands.
Strange, oriental dreams follow the exertion. The listener awakes in a languid, atonal nightscape, with an occasional, distant fiddle overheard from a brigands’ camp. Caddisflies and vampires flourish, but reason fails. It is the world of “The Manuscript Found in Saragasso.”
Happy birthday, Karol Szymanowski.
Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 (1916):
His Symphony No. 4 “Song of the Night” (1914-1916):
PHOTO: Optic phenomenon known as the “Brocken Spectre,” captured in the Tatra Mountains, which occurs when a person sees his shadow cast on a cloud at a lower altitude