Ignacy Feliks Dobrzyński (1807-1867) was a slightly older contemporary of Frédéric Chopin and a classmate of his at the Warsaw Conservatory in the 1820s. Dobrzyński was a pianist and conductor as well as a composer, but unlike his far more famous compatriot, he chose to remain in Poland rather than further his career in western Europe, and as a result found his opportunities increasingly limited.
Most of his music therefore dates from the 1820s and 30s. It includes his two symphonies, a piano concerto, a variety of chamber music and what is reckoned to be his greatest achievement, the opera Monbar, or the Filibusters. This pair of discs from the Polish Radio Symphony under Lukasz Borowicz provides a valuable introduction to the music of a composer who may hardly be known outside Poland nowadays, but who on this evidence deserves much more exposure.
For all its fluency, the least interesting of the pieces here is the early piano concerto, which Dobrzyński composed when he was just 17, but which apparently was never played in public in his lifetime. Stylistically, it's derived from Hummel above all, though there are just occasional hints that Chopin may have seen the score before he composed his own F minor concerto five years later. But as Borowicz's performances show, it's in the overture to Monbar, completed in 1838, and in the second symphony, the "Characteristic" that Dobryzyński composed in 1834 but revised near the end of his life in 1862 , that his real voice emerges.
With its dark-hued opening, the overture has distinct echoes of Weber about it, while the symphony borrows Polish dance forms – kujawiak, mazurka, krakowiak – that are incorporated into a style clearly indebted to Mendelssohn. But Dobryzyński does it with such panache – the finale of the symphony is exhilaratingly exuberant – that it seems all of a piece. It's a very convincing early romantic symphony that's well worth a place in the repertoire, while the overture is striking enough to suggest that the whole of the opera would be well worth investigating.
