Prologues for female choir and 2 concertante pianos, 4 horns, 4 flutes and percussion (1964)

Prologues was premiered during the 1964 Warsaw Autumn Festival. The performers included the composer and John Tilbury, a British pianist, who since 1961 had studied piano with Zbigniew Drzewiecki at the State School of Music in Warsaw. The whole was conducted by Roman Kuklewicz.

The Warsaw Autumn programme booklet contains a rather perfunctory note by the composer:

Prologues for female choir and 2 concertante pianos, 4 horns, 4 flutes and percussion written in early 1964. The choral parts do not use words. The duration of the work is 5-7 min.

The piece got very good reviews, with the critics appreciating the honesty of Sikorski’s artistic statement. His music was regarded as flowing naturally from his sensibility – the way of hearing and ‘reacting’ to musical colours. Already at that time his incredible and unique sensitivity to sound became a distinctive quality of the composer’s style. As Tadeusz Zieliński wrote in Ruch Muzyczny:

Tomasz Sikorski’s Prologues shows (after Antiphons and Echoes) that this young composer has already found his own style, very distinctive and easily recognisable. Sikorski’s style is very simple and unassuming, and far from any theoretical speculations. It is based on his direct, childlike almost fascination with sound as such: we can see that he enjoys the very resonance of the various instruments, that he plays with repeating the same piano chords (which bears some resemblance to Messiaen’s bird motifs), glissandi and undulations of the brass, noisy ringing of the percussion, and the acoustic phenomena of echo and reverberation. He does not shy away from simple harmonies and triads or from clusters, with all elements being perfectly matched in his works. His music is probably not very profound or sophisticated, but it is certainly very honest, spontaneous and direct, which is undoubtedly its virtue.

As he toyed with the idea of writing a piece for sopranos and instruments, Tomasz Sikorski originally planned to call it Epilogues. Undoubtedly, this would have been a rather unfortunate title for a composer at the beginning of his career. It might have become the proverbial grist for all unfavourably disposed critics. That is why Sikorski wrote Prologues.