Irène Régine Wieniawski’s date of birth has not been conclusively established. Her Brussels birth certificate records 16 May 1879, yet her mother, when later applying for British citizenship for her daughter, gave January 1880 as the date of birth. Wieniawski made her first attempts at composition as early as the age of nine, and, three years later, entered the Brussels Conservatoire. There, she studied piano and composition, and subsequently moved to Paris, where she continued her studies with Percy Pitt in composition, and with Michael Hambourg in the piano class. The daughter of Henryk Wieniawski, she began to publish under the pseudonym “Poldowski”, and her work was consequently received as fully autonomous.

Poldowski’s music gained considerable attention at that time thanks to the endorsement of Sir Henry Wood. Drawing loose inspiration from the work of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, among others, she was in her lifetime described as “Debussy’s spiritual daughter,” a label she never disputed. The set of 22 songs to texts by Paul Verlaine, recorded on the first disc, is the most representative showcase of Poldowski’s compositional resources; the second disc contains fourteen songs composed between 1900 and 1927 to French- and English-language texts, reflecting the bilingual character of Poldowski’s output. Performed by soprano Anna Mikolajczyk-Niewiedial and pianist Ewa Guz-Seroka, these works offer listeners a portrait of an artist of remarkable versatility, showing that she can, at once, write lullabies and dance tableaux, stylise early music, and draw on Impressionist colour.