Composed 1961; 9 minutes

“Tradition is like a tree,” said Polish-born composer Alexandre Tansman a decade before his death. “Dry branches fall off, but it is dangerous to uproot the tree. The roots have to stay.” Tansman’s roots remained in Poland—he absorbed Polish folk song and mazurka rhythms and wrote collections of Polonaises, Nocturnes, and Waltzes inspired by Chopin—but Paris was the city he called home for most of his life. Warsaw Conservatory circles frowned on his early ventures into chromaticism, but in Paris, his neoclassical, eclectic style was welcomed.

As a pianist, Tansman toured internationally with the support of leading conductors. Koussevitzky introduced his first two piano concertos to Paris and later championed them with the composer on a 1927 tour with the Boston Symphony. Toscanini, Mengelberg, Stokowski, and Monteux also conducted his works. Stravinsky, a friend, became the subject of his 1948 biography. Though he became a French citizen, wartime exile took Tansman to Los Angeles, where he joined fellow Jewish émigré musicians and composed film scores. Returning to France in 1946, Tansman added to a vast catalog of some 300 works across all major genres, including seven operas and nine symphonies. His Fantasy on Waltzes of Johann Strauss (1961), again written for the duo Vronsky & Babin, pays tribute to Strauss with brilliance and affection, avoiding irony or deconstruction. As Tansman put it, he rejected “any artificial modernization” that clashed with the original composer’s melodic language.