Polish piano

​​​​★★★★

Music awards are not worth much these days — given as they are on a weekly basis to every Tom, Finn and Fanny — but Poland’s Fryderyk Prize for the year’s best recording still retains some allure, named for the nation’s defining composer.

The 2026 Fryderyk Prize was presented last month to a recording of Andre Tchaikowsky’s two piano concertos by Peter Jablonski and the Polish radio orchestra in Katowice. It’s an ear-grabber.

Tchaikowsky — born Robert Andrzej Krauthammer — was a kid who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto dressed up as a girl and settled in Swinging London until his death, aged 46, in 1982. His greatest renown came by bequeathing his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in Hamlet (it was discarded in 2009).

Tchaikowsky’s music fell unfairly into disuse. The first piano concerto, written on leaving Poland in 1956, betrays echoes of Szymanowski and Shostakovich, though with sufficient originality to keep the listener’s mind alert. The second concerto, 15 years on, is the sort of piece a buttoned-up Britten or Boulez would have died to write — post-tonal modernity yet timeless in its personal narrative.

Tchaikowsky’s demon, for which he sought psychiatric help, was abandonment by his mother in the Ghetto before she was deported to her death. This music is a wayward search for unqualified love, arresting and irresistible. There’s also a bonus piano sonata. The soloist Jablonski, a versatile Swede, has put his career on the line to bring this neglected music to our attention. We should be grateful.