The album, on which the orchestra is conducted by its music director Łukasz Borowicz, was released as a CD and LP on the Polish DUX label.
Regarded as an unjustly forgotten composer, Stojowski spent most of his life in the United States, where he died in 1946, aged 76.
Zygmunt Stojowski (1870-1946). Photo: PAP/DPA
The Symphony in D minor was one of Stojowski’s major early works. It brought him the top prize at a competition organised by Ignacy Jan Paderewski at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig in 1898, and was later performed at venues including Berlin, Paris and New York.
The composition went down in the annals of Polish music history as it was one of the works featured in the inaugural concert of the Warsaw Philharmonic on November 5, 1901.
Borowicz described Stojowski’s symphony as "an extraordinary example of the transitional period, from neo-romanticism to the nascent new aesthetic trends."
He said Stojowski’s music fell out of concert programmes in the early 20th century, making the composer "one of the victims of the cult of modernism" at the time.
"It is only now that we are rediscovering Stojowski’s music, admiring the courage and mastery of the young composer who worked on the threshold of Poland regaining its independence in 1918," Borowicz said. "Works such as the Symphony in D minor helped Polish symphonic music develop and eventually flourish in the following decades of the 20th century."
Łukasz Borowicz. Photo: Krzysztof Świeżak/Polish Radio
Born in 1870, Stojowski studied composition and piano performance in Kraków, southern Poland, and in Paris. His teachers included Paderewski. In 1905, he moved to New York and became head of the piano department at the newly founded Institute of Musical Art.
He also pursued a career as a composer and pianist. He taught at schools including his own Stojowski Studio until the late 1930s. He died in New York on November 5, 1946.
Earlier this year, the Poznań Philharmonic won the International Classical Music Award in the vocal music category for its album Urlicht. Songs of Death and Resurrection, released by Harmonia Mundi.
The recording features works by Mahler, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hans Pfitzner, Engelbert Humperdinck, Alban Berg and Walter Braunfels, sung by German baritone Samuel Hasselhorn, with Borowicz conducting.
(mk/gs)