FELIX YANIEWICZ - MUSICIAN & COMPOSER
  • Home
  • Story
  • News
  • Piano
  • Exhibition
  • Music
  • Friends
  • Contact
  • Exhibition events programme

Yaniewicz's music

Yaniewicz’s legacy as a composer has been best preserved in his native Poland, where a complete edition of his works (edited by Andrzej Sitarz) is in preparation as part of the Monumenta Musicae in Polonia series.  The violin concertos have been published in the first two volumes, with a further volume of chamber music and songs currently in preparation.
Recordings
Elegie for violin and piano  
​Newly recorded for this project by Slovenian violinist Maja Horvat, Yaniewicz’s Elegie has survived in an arrangement by Alfred Moffat (1863-1950), a Scottish musician who worked on the rediscovery of early British violinists. 

​The score was dedicated to Yaniewicz’s grandson, the architect Charles Harrison Townsend. While most of Yaniewicz’s writing for strings is in a recognisably Mozartian idiom, this 
Elegie in Moffat’s arrangement is more Romantic in style.
Violin concertos
The five violin concertos that thrilled Yaniewicz’s audiences in his day have rarely been heard outside Poland in modern times.  In December 2022 the Scottish Chamber Orchestra will be reviving the concerto no. 3 in A major in its first British concert performance since Yaniewicz himself was the soloist.
Two concertos, no. 3 in A major and no. 5 in E minor, have been recorded by Zbigniew Pilch and Musicae Antiquae Collegium Varsoviense.
Divertimento concertante for string orchestra
The divertimento concertante appears on a recording (DUX 0198) of Polish music through the ages by the Wroclaw Chamber Orchestra conducted by Jan Stanienda, and an earlier 1977 recording, Musik aus Polen by the Polish Chamber orchestra conducted by Jerzy Maksymiuk. 


String trios
Yaniewicz’s six string trios have recently been recorded by Bartek Niziol and friends, and will be released in 2022.


Piano music
Yaniewicz wrote and arranged a large number of pieces for piano, including The Ladies Collection of Pianoforte Music, designed to suit the tastes of his fashionable clientele.  Many are rondos (a popular form in his day, allowing scope for virtuosic variations interspersed between each return of a popular theme) or Polish folk dances such as mazurkas.

Yaniewicz's first violin concerto in F Major was arranged for piano by his Czech contemporary Dussek, and has also been performed as piano concerto (restoring the orchestration from the original version) by the Austrian pianist Ingolf Wunder with the Arthur Rubinstein Philharmonic Orchestra. 

Extracts from several of Yaniewicz's works for piano can be heard in the short film about the Yaniewicz & Green square piano here.



Yaniewicz’s musical legacy is also preserved in works by later Polish composers, such as Artur Malawski’s Sonata on a theme by Janiewicz (1951) and Siciliana and Rondo on themes by Janiewicz (1952).
  • Home
  • Story
  • News
  • Piano
  • Exhibition
  • Music
  • Friends
  • Contact
  • Exhibition events programme