Szymanowski's string quartets (1917, 1927) remind me of many aspects of Copland. Both were fond of extracting a thin, airy sound from the string instruments as effects suited to beginning or ending a piece. The dialectic between consonance and dissonance is even more flirtatious; the end of the 1st movement of #1 can only be described as whimsical, abruptly announcing F major after several minutes of highly atonal development. Despite their journeys away from tradition, both composers stick with relatively straightforward bowing techniques such as tremolo and pizzicato, forgoing the need others felt to generate special effects on the instrument itself.

The preludes for piano (1900), however, evoke a tradition a full century removed from Copland. The forms are taken from Chopin -- European keyboard exercises with a Polish twist -- but the harmony and technique are even simpler. Unsurprisingly, these are Szymanowski's Opus 1, representing youthful improvisations more than serious works of a professional composer.

The Litany to the Virgin Mary (1933) represents a much more mature work. The verses are very short, so the two poems are repeated many times with increasingly passionate use of the orchestra and chorus to accompany the soprano. Thus, a lyrical line is transformed into complex harmonies (the liner notes indicate there are many divisi in the strings, for instance), almost as if in theme and variations. The second poem opens with the trademark eerie high strings, then following the same pattern of statement and expansion. The harmonies themselves are an interesting halfway point on the road to the "true" modernism of Copland's Orchestral Variations (or serialism, or the many others in the standard Western European canon who openly rejected late/post-Romanticism). The Polish were apparently not afraid to push tonality even further.

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