Krzysztof Meyer

Piano Sonatas

Krzysztof Meyer, who studied with Stanislaw Wiechowicz and Krzysztof Penderecki in Krakow as well as with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, ranks among the most important Polish composers of his generation. His oeuvre encompasses works from all genres. He was awarded the most important composition prices, including that of the Prince Pierre de Monaco Foundation for his opera Kyberiad in 1970, two special prizes from the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers Competition in 1970 and 1978, and the Herder Prize in 1984. Since the 1987 he has split his professional life between Krakow, where he was vice-president of the Academy of Music, and Cologne, were he taught composition at the Conservatory. Between 1985 and 1989 he was president of the Polish Composers Union. Krzysztof Meyer is a protagonist of the so called 'Polish School' and also a distinguished writer on music. He gained worldwide reputation for his biography of Shostakovich.Meyer's relationship with the piano is a very personal one. He has played the instrument since his childhood, attaining the perfection needed to perform in public at a very early age. For many years, he composed piano works primarily for his personal use. The first four sonatas reflect the stylistic development of the young composer whose primary reference - as of so many other composers of his generation - was Bartók. The parallel triads at the end of Meyer's Sonata No. 1, a quote from the conclusion of Bartók's String Quartet no. 6, can clearly be heard as a reference and homage to the great Hungarian composer who died prematurely in 1945. Meyer's later three sonatas attest to how Polish 'sonorism' had developed and flourished in the 1960s: a prominent feature of the Polish School, which reacted to serialism not with systems and rules, but with a search for new sounds. The composer accompanied the WRD studio recordings as artistic advisor. Christian Seibert gave his debut concert at the age of ten. At sixteen, he began studies with Pavel Gililov in Cologne. He went on to study in Vienna, participating in master classes with pianists such as Bruno Leonardo Gelber and Rudolf Kehrer. The Busoni Competition in Bolzano, the Robert Schumann Competition in Zwickau, and other international successes paved his way to many concert halls in Germany and abroad, including the Gasteig in Munich, the Salzburger Residenz, and London's Wigmore Hall. The cpo label has released Christian Seibert's recordings of piano music by Ernst Toch and Alexandre Tansman.