Penderecki reviews

Antoni Wit’s impressive Naxos survey of the large-scale works of Krzysztof Penderecki may well one day come to be regarded as definitive, but not until Poland’s leading composer puts down his pen. For now, the series will always be playing catch-up, since Penderecki keeps adding substantial pieces to his output. This latest release is a case in point: 35 years separate the Magnificat, a seminal work in the composer’s stylistic evolution, and Kadisz, one of his most powerful scores of recent years.

Krzysztof Penderecki’s prolific output is rich in concertos, many of them written for the biggest names in the business – Mstislav Rostropovich, Isaac Stern and Anne-Sophie Mutter among them. It was Emanuel Ax who gave the premiere of the Piano Concerto in Philadelphia in 2002, but the work was substantially revised and ‘re-premiered’ by Barry Douglas in Cincinnati five years later.

This programme has been gathering fame since it was first performed in Poland last September, and the recording is not the end of the project: there was even a dedicated www.pendereckigreenwood.com website trailing a performance in July at the Open’er Festival in Gdynia, Poland’s answer to Glastonbury. It brings together Krzysztof Penderecki and Radiohead’s guitarist Jonny Greenwood, who cites Penderecki as a long-standing influence.

Krzysztof Penderecki’s music for string orchestra spans almost his entire output. Though none of the pieces on this disc counts among his major works, it adds up to an attractive portrait of the composer. Some of his most famous scores seem to carry ‘baggage’, while these pieces represent a purer side of his art; all of them are well written and effective.

Krzysztof Penderecki’s many detractors routinely accuse the now senior Polish composer of having retreated into an unadventurous and conservative musical language. But it is a style that has served him well, especially in his choral writing.

 This disc brings together works by Penderecki for small string orchestra – augmented by Albrecht Mayer’s singing cor anglais in a new version of the solemn 1979 Adagietto for the opera Paradise Lost. It’s a pity Mayer didn’t also play the 1965 Capriccio for oboe and strings, because there’s a shortage of music from the composer’s most exciting period of experimental soundscapes: as it is, there’s just the 1973 Intermezzo, full of slithering quarter-tone scales.

Something of a sleeping giant in Penderecki’s output, Utrenja is a sequel in more ways than one to the better-known St Luke Passion.

It was written soon after it, in 1970 and ’71, and it reflects on the events following the Crucifixion: its two parts are called respectively ‘The Entombment of Christ’ and ‘The Resurrection of Christ’. But the texts here are mostly in Old Slavonic, culled by Penderecki from Orthodox Easter liturgies – an early sign of his long engagement with Russian church tradition.

A sombre Te Deum, dark Magnificat (and unchristmasy Christmas Symphony); only the Lacrimosa and Kanon fulfil titular expectations! Despite fuzziness of detail, Penderecki’s personality shines through. Paul Riley