With new recordings of Karol Szymanowski's two violin concertos scheduled for future release, Naxos has been very supportive of a composer whose recordings seem to evaporate so quickly from the catalogue. Born in the Ukraine in 1882 with a mixed Polish and Swedish parentage, his early education was at home due to a leg injury, but moved to Warsaw at the age of 19 to study composition. Working under the patronage of Prince Lubomirski as part of the 'Young Poland Music Group', it was time spent in Berlin and Leipzig that was to shape his early career, there falling under the influence of Wagner and Strauss. Hearing Debussy and Ravel created his love of sensuous and exotic sound that created the style by which he is now best remembered.� His home destroyed in the Russian Revolution, he settled in Poland in 1919, and though his music was little understood there, his posthumous description has been that of a major Polish national composer. The music recorded here spans much of his life and embraces his changing styles, the earliest being the sonata of 1904 when in the grip of his Germanic period. Though in no way an immature work, it owed greatly to Brahms, its three movements nicely structured and the thematic material interesting if not always memorable. Moving forward six years for the Romance he has taken a quantum leap forward, even if the scoring owes a debt to the French Impressionists. By 1915, and with one of his best-known chamber works, the three Myths, he was writing in those exotic shades that gave his musical language a sense of sublime eroticism. Miriam Kramer's reliable account of the sonata now turns to those ecstatic colours as the music soars into the outer stratospheres, her intonation so totally reliable. There is feel of being inside the music throughout the disc, Nicholas Durcan a most sympathetic partner, and when offered the opportunity proves a fine soloist. I have heard better piano quality from Naxos, but this is a highly desirable disc.