Hyperion Records

The three poems comprising Métopes were composed in 1915 and they stand at the threshold of Szymanowski’s full maturity as a composer, when he rejected German influences in favour of a highly personal ‘impressionist’ manner. Like the metopes in the friezes of Doric architecture, Szymanowski’s pieces are intended to outline stages in a history, here based on Homer’s Odyssey. The idea was probably suggested by the metopes from the temple of Selinunt which the composer saw while visiting the museum in Palermo the previous year. The first of the three pieces, ‘Isle of the Sirens’, takes much of its musical detail from the mythological source, not only in the more and more insistent lullaby theme which runs through the music but in configurations which presumably reflect the double flute and lyre associated in Homer with the Sirens. Some of these patterns also suggest bird calls, reminding us that the Sirens were half bird and half woman.

‘Calypso’, the second of the Métopes, portrays the daughter of Atlas who personifies the depths of the sea and who kept Odysseus on the island of Ortygia for seven years. A recurring refrain-like melody in the composer’s favourite ‘narrative’ manner—a 6/8 metre with dotted rhythm—is surrounded by a ‘bitonality’ of white and black notes evoking the sea. The indebtedness to Debussy (Brouillards) and Ravel (Jeux d’eau) will be apparent.

The relatively static character of these two pieces is balanced by the third of the Métopes, ‘Nausicaa’, depicting the dancing of Nausicaa and the Phaecian maidens who discover Odysseus after his shipwreck. Stylizations of the dance are common in middle-period Szymanowski (many pieces are about the dance) and ‘Nausicaa’ is closely related to several dance pieces from earlier song-cycles. As in these pieces, the element of stylization grows stronger as the piece develops, with subtle rhythmic dislocations of the basic metre, so that by the end the dance features have been submerged totally. There are closing cyclic references to the lyre-like patterns from ‘Isle of the Sirens’ and to the white-note/black-note figuration and refrain melody from ‘Calypso’.

from notes by Jim Samson © 1991