Da Vinci Classics
Ignacy Krzemiński-Iwan, Julia Maria Figueres Heinz, Weronika Bagniewska
Physical and Digital Release: 16 October 2026
Candor Piano Trio explores rarely heard piano trios by Granados, Różycki, Chapí and Scharwenka, tracing contrasting voices within the late-Romantic chamber repertoire.
16.71€
Digital programme · 10 tracks
Track timings refer to the digital edition.
Ignacy Krzemiński-Iwan is a Polish cellist born on 2 September 1999 in Warsaw. He is active as a soloist, chamber musician, orchestral player, and educator. He studied under Prof. Tomasz Strahl, Prof. Katarzyna Polonek, Prof. Tomasz Lisiecki, and Prof. Maciej Mazurek. His first musical steps were guided by Anna Skibińska-Haponiuk and Tatiana Przybylska-Karaszewska, who played a significant role in the early stage of his artistic development.
In 2023, he graduated from the Ignacy Jan Paderewski Academy of Music in Poznań. He subsequently continued his studies in Madrid, where he pursued a Master Soloist Performance programme in the class of Prof. Michał Dmochowski, as well as chamber music studies in the class of Prof. Andrey Yaroshinski at the Centro Superior Katarina Gurska, completing both in 2025.
As a soloist and chamber musician, he has performed in Poland, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. He is a laureate of numerous prizes at international music competitions in Poland, Spain, Andorra, the United States, and Italy, in both solo and chamber music categories.
A particularly important aspect of his artistic activity is chamber music and the exploration of lesser-known repertoire. He has been a member of ensembles such as the Fons Vitae String Quintet and the Quisquilla String Quartet. Since 2023, he has co-founded the Candor Piano Trio with Julia Maria Figueres Heinz and Weronika Bagniewska. The ensemble has performed in Spain and Poland, presenting projects dedicated to Spanish, Polish, and Central European repertoire.
Ignacy has participated twice in the Erasmus+ programme. In 2022, he took part in an orchestral project in Teramo, collaborating on a production of Gaetano Donizetti’s opera L’elisir d’amore under the baton of Simone Genuini, with performances in various Italian cities. In 2024–2025, he again participated in the Erasmus+ programme, undertaking artistic and pedagogical traineeships at the “Teresa Berganza” Conservatory of Music in Madrid.
From the beginning of his artistic education, he has taken part in numerous courses and masterclasses led by distinguished musicians and educators from Poland and abroad, including K. Michalik, A. Gebert, A. Kemenes, C. Samatanga, R. Trainini, J. Grimm, and O. Saiz Vega.
In addition to his musical career, Ignacy is also engaged in literary work. He is the author of a poetry collection titled Impuissance and continues his writing activity, publishing texts, articles, and essays devoted to culture and the arts. He has co-organised literary events and festivals, creating spaces for dialogue between music, literature, and other artistic disciplines. His writing remains an important element of his artistic identity and a natural complement to his musical work.
Julia Maria Figueres Heinz
Julia Maria Figueres Heinz is a Spanish pianist born in 2004, currently based in Madrid, where she is pursuing the fourth year of her Bachelor’s Degree in Piano Performance at the Centro Superior Katarina Gurska under the guidance of Professor Andrey Yaroshinskiy. She began her musical education at L’Estudi de Música de Tarragona and completed her Professional Music Degree at the Conservatory of Vila-seca, while also attending masterclasses in Valencia with Juan Lago and István Székely.
She has further refined her artistic training with renowned musicians such as Edith Fischer, Karst de Jong, Francisco Fierro, Andreas Fröhlich, Francesco Mirabella, Murray McLachlan, and Yoshio Hamano, among others.
Her career has been recognized with numerous international awards. These include the First Prize at the Franz Liszt Center International Piano Competition (2023) and the Great Masters International Competition – Vladimir Horowitz Edition (2021); the Second Prize at the Great Piano Masters International Online Piano Competition (2023), the Golden Piano Talents International Competition (2022), the II FIPMA – Villahermosa International Piano Competition (2021), the Scherzo International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv (2022), and the Seville Piano Competition (2019). She was also awarded the Third Prize at the Excellence Piano Awards (2022) and received an Honourable Mention at the Orbetello Piano Competition in Italy (2023). In 2022, she was granted the prestigious Ferrer-Salat Foundation Scholarship for young talents.
As a performer, she has given recitals at important international venues. She has appeared as a soloist at the Washington International Piano Festival at The Kennedy Center (USA), as well as in cities such as Brescia (Italy, 2019 and 2023), Barcelona (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi), Madrid (Museum of Romanticism, Russian House, Teatro Tribueñe), Soria, León (Fundación Eutherpe Hall), Tortosa, Requena, Vila-seca, Altura, Benaguasil, Montserrat, and Telki (Hungary), among others. She has also performed with orchestra, notably at the Aula Magna “Tirso de Molina” in Soria.
She forms a piano duo with pianist Ferran Mir, with whom she has performed concerts at La Granja de San Ildefonso(Segovia) and at the Auditorium of Centro Superior Katarina Gurska (Madrid). In addition to her career as a concert pianist, she collaborates with singers and instrumentalists as an accompanist pianist.
Weronika Bagniewska, born on 15 April 1999, graduated from the soloist department at the Centro Superior Katarina Gurska in Madrid, where she studied in the class of S. Fatkulin and chamber music with A. Yaroshinski, completing her studies in 2025. Previously, she studied at the Ignacy Jan Paderewski Academy of Music in Poznań in the class of Prof. M. Baranowski and his assistants, M. Sitarz-Wawrzyniak and J. Kreft, where she obtained both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She began her musical education at the age of seven in Grudziądz, studying under P. Jankowski, J. Stinerman, and B. Siarkiewicz.
Weronika has a particular interest in chamber music. She has performed in various chamber ensembles, including the Fons Vitae String Quintet and the Quisquilla String Quartet, with whom she has toured Germany, Italy, and Poland. She is currently a member of the Candor Piano Trio, with which she performs throughout Spain and Poland. She has also recorded albums as a member of ensembles and orchestras, including releases for the labels Harmonia Mundi (Urlicht – Song of Death and Resurrection) and Dux (Schönberg, Strauss – Verklärte Nacht, Metamorphosen).
In the 2022/2023 season, she was a member of the Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra. Since 2024, she has regularly collaborated with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia in A Coruña, as well as with the Palau de les Arts in Valencia. In the 2025/2026 season, she was invited on several occasions to serve as guest concertmaster, performing with orchestras collaborating with the Auditorio Nacional in Madrid.
Weronika has participated twice in the Erasmus+ programme. In 2022, she took part in an orchestral project in Teramo, performing in Gaetano Donizetti’s opera L’elisir d’amore under the baton of Simone Genuini. In 2024/2025, she again participated in the Erasmus+ programme, undertaking artistic and pedagogical traineeships at the “Teresa Berganza” Conservatory of Music in Madrid. In 2026, she became section leader of the second violins during the spring project of the Orchestre National des Jeunes du Luxembourg.
From the beginning of her musical education, she has taken part in numerous masterclasses and continues to work with distinguished musicians from Poland and abroad, including E. Schumann, M. Vaimann, H. Zack, F. Croitoru, K. Troussov, A. Gebert, A. Kemenes, S. Fatkulin, Ł. Błaszczyk, and B. Bryła. As an orchestral musician, she has collaborated with conductors such as F. Luisi, M. Elder, R. González-Monjas, G. Guerrero, P. McCreesh, T. Brauner, A. Zuckermann, H. Griffiths, S. Genuini, D. Slobodeniouk, J. Trigueros, J. Maksymiuk, and A. Wit, among others.
Enrique Granados: (b Lérida [Lleida], 27 July 1867; d at sea, English Channel, 24 March 1916). Catalan composer and pianist. Though he enjoyed considerable fame in his native Barcelona, within Spain as a whole his music was less well known than his enduring reputation as the composer of ‘La maja y el ruiseñor’ from Goyescas might suggest. Apart from Goyescas (in its original version for piano), only his Danzas españolas and his first opera María del Carmen brought him significant national acclaim, and relatively few of his 140-odd works were published or performed regularly in his lifetime. A comprehensive view of his work has been hampered by the prevailing but misconceived tendency to divide his music into three compositional periods – known, misleadingly, as the ‘Nationalistic’, the ‘Romantic’ and the ‘Goyesque’ – with a disproportionate emphasis on his Goyescas. Sadly, the greater part of his diverse and extensive output remains obscure and unpublished and, as yet, no detailed study has been made of his life.
Ludomir Różycki
(b Warsaw, 6 Nov 1884; d Katowice, 1 Jan 1953). Polish composer, son of aleksander Różycki. He studied with Aleksander Michałowski (piano), Gustaw Roguski and Michał Biernacki (theory and harmony), and Noskowski (composition) at the Warsaw [Music Institute] (now the Warsaw Conservatory) and graduated with the gold prize in 1904; from then until 1907 he studied with Humperdinck at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Together with Grzegorz Fitelberg, Szymanowski and Szeluto, Różycki founded in 1905 the Young Polish Composers' Publishing Company, an association that came to be referred to as Young Poland. In 1908 Różycki accepted the position of conductor at the Lwów Opera, and until 1912 taught the advanced piano class at the Conservatory of the Galician Music Society in Lwów. From 1912 to 1918 he stayed in Paris, then Berlin before settling in Warsaw in 1919; until 1920 he was conductor of the opera at the Wielki Theatre, and thereafter devoted himself to composition. He was a founder member (1926) and first president of the Union of Polish Composers, and a professor at the Warsaw Music Academy in 1930–31 (during Szymanowski's tenure as rector). He received the State Music Award for his opera Eros i Psyche in 1930 and the gold medal at the Paris World Exhibition in 1939 for his ballet Apollo i dziewczyna (‘Apollo and the Maiden’). In 1945 he settled in Katowice where he assumed responsibility for the composition class at the State Higher School for Music (now the Katowice Academy). He devoted a lot of time to reconstructing those of his works that had been destroyed by fire during World War II.
Philipp Scharwenka
(b Samter [now Szamotuły], 16 Feb 1847; d Bad Nauheim, 16 July 1917). Polish-German composer and teacher, brother of Xaver Scharwenka. His early musical training was at the secondary school in Posen. In 1865 his family moved to Berlin, where he studied composition with Richard Wüerst and Heinrich Dorn at Kullak's Neue Akademie der Tonkunst. In 1868 he began his long teaching career as an instructor at the academy. Six years later, his orchestral works began to be performed, and in 1880 he married the violinist Marianne Stresow (b 25 Feb 1856; d 24 Oct 1918). When his younger brother Xaver founded the Scharwenka Conservatory in Berlin (1881) he joined its staff, teaching theory and composition. He became its co-director, with Hugo Goldschmidt, in 1891, when Xaver emigrated temporarily to the USA. Philipp was a competent, dedicated composer and teacher; his own career, however, was overshadowed by that of his forceful, energetic brother.
Ruperto Chapí
(b Villena, nr Alicante, 27 March 1851; d Madrid, 25 March 1909). Spanish composer. In 1865 he conducted the band in his home village, where his father, an enthusiastic music-lover, was a barber. Two years later Chapí enrolled in the Madrid Conservatory, studying with Arrieta and winning first prize in harmony in 1869. While earning a precarious living as cornettist in the Circo de Price theatre orchestra, he composed an overture Zanzé and his first zarzuela Abel y Caín. In 1871 he competed successfully for the directorship of the artillery regimental band. His first symphonic suite La corte de Granada: fantasía morisca was composed in 1873 (the third of its four movements, ‘Serenata’, is still played); his one-act opera Las naves de Cortés, performed at the Teatro Real on 19 April 1874 with Tamberlik in the title role, earned him a three-year government grant to study, first at the Spanish Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, then at Milan and Paris. As fruit of these years abroad, he sent back the one-act operas La hija de Jefté (1876) and La muerte de Garcilaso (1878), and the three-act Roger de Flor (1878).
Beginning with his one-act Música clásica (1880), Chapí, once more in Madrid, wrote more than 100 zarzuelas, many of which ran more than 100 consecutive nights. In contrast with Chueca, who caught the ear of the illiterate, Chapí's zarzuelas appealed to the city's middle and upper classes. In 1905 he published the first of four string quartets, a unique venture for a zarzuela composer and one symptomatic of his loftier musical aims.
The programme assembled on this disc outlines a chamber constellation in which the piano trio presents itself as a space of passage between geographies and poetics. Spain, Poland and the German world are summoned as interior territories. The works of Enrique Granados, Ludomir Różycki, Ruperto Chapí and Philipp Scharwenka belong to an age in which chamber music continued to measure itself against the prestige of Germanic models, while at the same time seeking a more personal utterance, nourished by popular inflections, urban melancholy and crepuscular lyricism. The piano, heir to…
The programme assembled on this disc outlines a chamber constellation in which the piano trio presents itself as a space of passage between geographies and poetics. Spain, Poland and the German world are summoned as interior territories. The works of Enrique Granados, Ludomir Różycki, Ruperto Chapí and Philipp Scharwenka belong to an age in which chamber music continued to measure itself against the prestige of Germanic models, while at the same time seeking a more personal utterance, nourished by popular inflections, urban melancholy and crepuscular lyricism. The piano, heir to the Romantic salon and the public concert hall, becomes the centre of a dialogue in which violin and cello are not satellites, but voices called upon to envelop, contradict and ignite the discourse.
Enrique Granados opens this itinerary with the Piano Trio op. 50, a piece that allows one to observe a less frequented aspect of his artistic physiognomy. Posterity has often fixed the image of the Catalan composer around poetic pianism, Goyesque refinement, and the memory of Spanish dances and inflections transfigured into cultivated language. Yet his chamber activity, more limited than his pianistic and theatrical output, reveals a sensibility attentive to the quality of instrumental song. In him the Romantic tradition becomes a mobile language, capable of absorbing French elegance and the Iberian taste for an ornamented line. The trio does not display a superficial nationalism. Rather, it allows a Mediterranean light to filter into a formal organism that looks towards European chamber music with respect and freedom.
The Poco allegro con espressione of the Piano Trio op. 50 establishes an atmosphere of noble intimacy. The tonality of C major does not coincide with an ingenuous serenity, for the discourse is animated by harmonic shadings, restrained impulses and a song that seems to wish to smile without losing the memory of its own melancholy. The piano sustains and envelops, while violin and cello weave a dialogue in which lyricism is born of reciprocity. The Scherzetto lightens the material with a swift and subtle gesture. Behind the grace of the surface one senses an art of measure, a vivacity that avoids gratuitous brilliance and prefers the play of agile profiles. The Duetto is the affective centre of the work. Here the two string voices assume an almost vocal proximity, while the piano creates a space of resonance in which cantability becomes discreet confession. In the Finale the energy gathers itself into a more expansive conclusion, crossed by a vitality that carries the preceding refinement towards a more open clarity.
With Ludomir Różycki the landscape changes colour. The Rhapsody op. 33 for piano, violin and cello belongs to the climate of musical Young Poland, a season that sought to renew the national language through contact with European late Romanticism, harmonic sensuality and the freedom of the modern gesture. Różycki, trained between Warsaw and Berlin, was a composer of theatre, of orchestral works and of operas in which melody often preserves a broad, almost vocal imprint. The rhapsody rejects the rigidity of a closed design and privileges the succession of expressive states. In this piece such freedom does not mean dispersion. The single-movement trajectory, articulated in contrasting sections, preserves links with the logic of sonata form, as though the narrative impulse required an architectural memory in order not to lose itself in its own fire. The dedication to Bronisław Poźniak, Hugo Kortschak and Heinz Beyer, the first recipients of the score and members of a Berlin trio, illuminates the concretely chamber origin of the work. The tonality of D minor impresses upon the Rhapsody op. 33 a shadowed ground, yet the invention does not remain confined within the pathetic. Episodes of almost gypsy ardour emerge, alongside inflections that recall the Hungary imagined by European Romanticism, sudden lyrical openings and a propensity for colour that betrays the orchestral experience of the composer. The piano often assumes a propulsive function, while violin and cello alternate between declamation, song and impetus. The impression is that of a nocturnal tale, traversed by flashes of lightning, in which the form proceeds in successive waves.
Ruperto Chapí introduces another Spain, less associated with the pianistic myth and more deeply rooted in the history of the stage. His fame remains linked above all to zarzuela and lyric theatre, yet precisely for this reason the Piano Trio acquires particular significance. In a catalogue dominated by vocality, dramatic gesture and theatrical communication, a chamber piece for piano, violin and cello reveals the desire to measure himself against a genre in which words fall silent and the structure must rest upon the responsibility of the musical material. Alongside the string quartets, in which the later chamber reflection of Chapí would find a more accomplished form, this trio reveals the will to place Spanish music within a horizon both national and universal, far from facile picturesque colouring. The work, in D major and in two movements, has the character of a broad and ardent fragment, almost a window opened onto a chamber project that might have developed further. The Allegro con fuoco already bears in its title an indication of temperament. Fire is not merely speed or volume, but internal tension, theatrical impulse converted into instrumental form. The writing shows a concern for architecture, for the relationship between exposition and development, for the balance between melodic impulse and control of the discourse. Yet the material preserves a gestural quality typical of Chapí, as though the scenic energy of zarzuela were sublimated within chamber dialectic. The Scherzo. Presto, in D minor, narrows and intensifies the gesture. The rapid motion, rhythmic nervousness and the sense of a dance traversed by shadows indicate a Spanish path towards the brief form, animated by an almost corporeal impulse. The contrast between the two movements produces an unusual tension, since the affirmative solidity of the first is followed by an agile, dark, suspended epilogue.
Philipp Scharwenka closes the journey by bringing the listening into the broader Central European Romantic tradition, through the work of a Polish-German composer whose biography reflects the complex cultural geography of his time. Born in a borderland between the Prussian world and Polish memory, and brother of the more celebrated Xaver Scharwenka, Philipp belonged to a milieu in which German musical institutions, Polish cultural roots, and the cosmopolitan life of late nineteenth-century Europe were closely intertwined. A composer, pedagogue, and man of musical institutions, he was closely connected with Berlin musical life and with the training of generations of musicians. The Piano Trio in C-sharp minor op. 100 belongs to a mature Romanticism, conscious of the legacies of Mendelssohn and Schumann, yet inclined towards a later expressive density, a more shadowed melancholy, and a formal care that avoids both academicism and uncontrolled effusion. The choice of the tonality of C-sharp minor contributes to the distinctive character of the work. It is not a frequent region within the piano trio repertoire, and precisely its dark, tense, slightly remote colouring confers upon the piece a recognisable profile. The layout of the movements, too, with a slow opening followed by two rapid movements, alters traditional expectation and imparts to the work a particular dramatic trajectory. The Lento tranquillo is no mere introduction. It is a first movement in its own right, grave and collected, in which the broad tempo allows the themes to acquire weight and resonance. The tranquillity of the marking does not coincide with immobility, but with a meditative severity. The voices proceed like figures advancing through half-light, while the piano gives depth to the harmonic ground. The central Allegro introduces a different state of energy. The writing becomes more mobile, at times nervous, with a lightness of step that may recall the Mendelssohnian inheritance, though the colour remains darker, more autumnal. The clarity of proportions does not preclude an intense emotional circulation. Scharwenka here displays his competence as a builder, distributing the functions among the three instruments with balance and giving the piano a rich part without transforming it into egocentric virtuosity. In the concluding Allegro appassionato the work finds its own dramatic necessity. The appassionato is not spent in an emphatic gesture, but becomes a principle of cohesion, a force that gathers the initial shadows and projects them into a more heated discourse. The tension between impetus and measure constitutes the enduring fascination of the trio.
These four works bear witness to a chamber music poised between the end of Romanticism and the first inquietudes of the twentieth century. Granados brings to the trio a lyrical luminosity that need not proclaim itself national in order to be inwardly Spanish. Różycki transforms form into rhapsodic flow, where Slavic song and Berlin modernity brush against one another in incandescent matter. Chapí shows the instrumental countenance of a man of the theatre, seeking in the trio the meeting point between Germanic discipline and Iberian vitality. Scharwenka, finally, reaffirms the nobility of a chamber tradition founded upon equilibrium, density and thematic development. In all of them, the piano is not mere harmonic support, but a space of memory. From the dialogue between strings and keyboard there arises a luminous melancholy, a light filtered at twilight, when forms appear truer because freed from the excess of day.
Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2026
Różycki: Rhapsody, Op. 33
Candor Piano Trio · Garden After Midnight
A listening selection from Garden After Midnight: Piano Trios · C01236
Selected awards, reviews and interviews. Radio broadcasts and podcasts are listed separately below.
Pizzicato
“performed with great charm and vitality, rich in contrast”
Remy Franck praises the Candor Piano Trio’s charm, vitality and expressive contrasts in Granados, its energetic virtuosity in Chapí and its inspired, vibrant performances of Scharwenka. The programme also includes Różycki’s Rhapsody.
Read the review ↗ - Pizzicato
![Viaggi Infiniti [Endless Journeys]](https://i0.wp.com/davinci-edition.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/006-coverviaggi2.jpg?fit=768%2C769&ssl=1)
