Toccata

Szabelski wrote the Toccata for orchestra in 1938; the Polish publisher PWM lists it as a movement drawn from his Suite, op. 10. He had studied organ and composition in Warsaw with Szymanowski's circle and settled in Katowice, where the war destroyed part of his manuscripts and where he later taught Henryk Górecki. The Toccata belongs to his neoclassical decade — motoric rhythm, tight counterpoint, a texture built on ostinato — and stands well before the turn towards serialism and sonorism that reshaped his music in the late 1950s.