After a holiday in North Africa, Szymanowski returned to Tymoszówka, the family estate in the heart of Ukraine, via Italy, Paris (where he met Stravinsky), and London, catching the last scheduled train from Berlin as events leading to the Great War began to disrupt public life. There, in hermetic isolation, relieved only by winters in Kiev and brief visits to Moscow and St. Petersburg, he embarked upon his richest, most fruitful period, distilling memory and intoxicated fantasy into the music by which he is largely remembered - the Myths for piano and violin, the Third Symphony ("Song of the Night"), the First Violin Concerto, and the complementary sets of piano pieces, Métopes and Masques. The latter took shape over 1915/16, reaching beyond the elusive, allusive world of the newly composed Métopes into a psychic twilight in which pianistic gesture reflects pure, highly excited nervosité. But lest their volatility lose point, they are formally tight, the ecstatic utterance of Schéhérazade, for instance, depending upon the interplay of two languorously disported themes. Tantris le Bouffon, the second piece, refers to Ernst Hardt's surreally zany 1908 send-up of the Tristan legend, with the lover's demented antics pianistically mirrored in hallucinatory skittishness. While Schéhérazade is dedicated to the now forgotten pianist Sascha Dubianksy, who gave the Métopes and Masques their premières (St. Petersburg, 1916), and Tantris to Szymanowski's cousin, the great Harry Neuhaus, the Sérénade de Don Juan was reserved for his close friend, Artur Rubinstein, just then enjoying immense success as a flamboyant concert artist, bon vivant, and playboy. After a quasi improvisando fantastico flourish, a smirking melody, flecked with suggestions of strumming, veers from sensual to sardonic to impetuously impassioned to shudder with a sudden wan affliction before vanishing into aerial rapidity and a final sforzando exclamation.

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