Search - Krzysztof Penderecki, Ensemble Villa Musica :: Penderecki: Chamber Music

When Penderecki sounds like everybody but Penderecki

Discophage | France | 01/05/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This disc mainly documents Penderecki's later style of composition, applied to chamber music. Except for the early Sonata for Violin and Piano (1953), a piece written at 20 even before the composer had entered the music academy in Cracow and evidently before his embrace of radicalism (heralded in 1959 with compositions such as Emanationen or Anaklasis), all the compositions were written between 1984 (Cadenza for solo viola) and 1993 (Clarinet Quartet), after Penderecki had switched back from his radicalism of the late 1950s to the mid-1970s to a more conservative outlook.



I am one to lament this evolution of Penderecki. I pulled this disc out of my shelves for sake of comparison with another recording of some of the same compositions (String Trio, Clarinet Prelude and Clarinet Quartet) with the Tale Quartet on BIS, a disc also featuring the two String Quartets from Penderecki's avant-garde period: 1960 and 1968 (Penderecki: Music For Clarinet & String Quartet). These are works of great invention and daringness, explorations in novel playing techniques and sounds, compositions of intense drama and evocativeness. They alone made the BIS disc worthwhile.



Nothing of the kind here. The early Violin & Piano Sonata displays the influence of whoever was influential back then: mainly Prokofiev and Bartok, and I also hear Bloch (his first Violin and Piano Sonata from 1923 was certainly radical for its time), and a little bit of Szymanowski (but more percussive). That's about where Ligeti started as well. As Penderecki, he then embraced avant-garde - but never reneged.



Per Slava is a short solo piece written for Rostropovich in 1986 and it sounds like a movement from a Britten Solo Cello Suite. For Britten it would have been fine, for Penderecki it is derivative, although I do find it one of the best compositions on this disc. Martin Ostertag plays it with big tone and plenty of sweep. Same is true with violist Enrique Santiago in Cadenza for solo viola, written in 1984 for violist Grigorij Shislin who had recently premiered the Viola Concerto. It sounds like the Viola Sonata Bartok didn't compose. Now, there's a trend here: if Penderecki moved from Bartok to Britten in the course of two years, he might end up composing the music of Penderecki. Unfortunately the Clarinet Prelude failed to fulfil the promise: written in 1987 for the 40th birthday of composer Paul Patterson, it starts slow, rises to an agitated and piercing climax and returns to slow - Penderecki didn't give much effort to architectural invention here. Clarinetist Ulf Rodenhäuser plays it with more caution and less swagger than Martin Fröst on the BIS CD referred to above. The String Trio from 1991 and Clarinet Quartet from 1993 sound as if they could have been composed by Ernst Krenek in his later years. The Trio even boasts a fully fledged, traditional fugue of no particular distinction, the kind of stuff everybody has been writing ever since Johann Sebastian, and the Clarinet Quartet has a Bergian Waltz. Again, it would have been fine for Krenek, but for Penderecki it is indistinctive and faceless. Add to that that, except perhaps in the first movement of the Trio where their powerful, even violent approach (with no loss of tonal control) pays dividends, the Villa Musica Ensemble is inferior to the Tale Quartet. Their fast movements (fugue of the trio, vivacissimo of the Quartet) plod, and the closer sonics don't allow for as much subtlety of tone and interplay as their counterparts on BIS. At 51:11 the TT isn't too generous either.



I'll keep the BIS disc if only for the two String Quartets, and let this one exit my collection.

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