My father was only 19 years old and still a student at the Warsaw State Conservatoire when he wrote his Piano Trio Op 1 (1934, rev. 1944 after being destroyed in the Warsaw Uprising)—it’s astonishing to believe when you hear the sophisticated harmonies and textures, which in some ways remind me of the late French romantics such as Ravel and Debussy. He says that it was originally an ‘Exercise’—the opening movement his first attempt at Sonata form, the second is song form and the third is a rondo. What especially interests me is that he says ‘without thought of public performance, I was trying not to control essential technicalities but to write a true musical composition containing some expressiveness of feeling and vitality’—he certainly succeeds with sweeping melodies and passionate mood changes that one could imagine occurring in a 19 year-old. It also echoes my personal sentiments now, as a slightly more mature 46 year-old who is prone to conveying emotion in her music over and above anything else! This version was subsequently revised again after his escape to the UK in 1954 but it would have been fascinating to hear what changed between his carefree and ebullient original teenage work to the war-scarred 29 year-old’s version.

from notes by Roxanna Panufnik © 2014