Szymanowski (1882-1937) wrote songs from his early twenties until five years before his death. More than 120 make up this first integral edition. Of his four song cycles, the Love Songs of Hafiz (1911), to Hans Bethge’s paraphrases of the Arabic poet, Songs of the Fairy Princess (1915) and Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin (1918) make occasional appearances on the concert platform outside Szymanowski’s native Poland, but all too rarely. The songs of his early maturity (ardently sung by the rising tenor Piotr Beczala) owe stylistic debts to Strauss and Wolf, Wagner and Liszt. By his mid-twenties, he was appealing to the international market by setting poems by two of Strauss’s favourite authors, Dehmel and Bierbaum, and from the folk collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn. A visit to North Africa inspired his interest in Islamic culture, which surfaces in the exotic chromaticism of the Hafiz and Muezzin sets. The singing, by three of the composer’s compatriots and Juliana Gondek, above, an American of Polish descent, is uniformly stylish, with Mees a committed pianist. Four stars