June 15, 2015

  • Penderecki: Old & New Choral Music!

     

    Penderecki: Magnificat; Kadisz
    Wojtek Gierlach, bass.  Male vocal ensemble,
    Warsaw Boys’ Choir, Warsaw Philharmonic Choir (Magnificat)
    Olga Pasichnyk, soprano. Alberto Mizrahi, tenor. Daniel Olbrychski, speaker.
    Warsaw Philharmonic Male Choir (Kadisz)
    Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra/Antoni Wit
    Naxos 8.572697
    Total Time:  65:12
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    During the 1950s and 1960s, Krzystof Penderecki (b. 1933) burst onto the European avant-garde music scene with works like Threnody and the St. Luke Passion.  The latter, cast in a variety of contemporary scoring techniques and approaches was not well received, but is today considered one of the great masterpieces of his more “sonorist” style.  As the composer entered the 1970s, he began to revisit more romantic traditions and styles in his work.  It was in this period that one of the works on this new Naxos release was created.

    The Magnificat was commissioned to mark the Salzburg Cathedral’s 1200th anniversary in 1974.  The work focuses on a bass soloist, children’s choir, a septet of male voices, and two smaller mixed choirs along with full orchestra.  The six-movement work, set in Latin, also utilizes Baroque music forms for some of its structural underpinning.  A series of clusters crescendo out of held notes as the “Magnifcat” movement opens with haunting choral writing and dense atmospheric music unfolds.  A timpani beat moves out from this somewhat intriguing depiction of light.  The following movement is a fugue with intense, dense writing that includes choral glissandi as brass add extra power underneath the choir.  Orchestral writing adds interjections to provide some contrast to the choral writing.  Somewhat of a break, or pause begins the “Et Misericordia” where the glissandi have been shifted to strings while the clusters are now move among the dense choral writing.  The bass declaims the text of “Fecit potentiam”.  The music is more solemn at first but then begins to grow in intensity again as we move to the penultimate movement, a passacaglia.  Here we begin to perceive motifs from earlier in the work being brought together now as the music moves into a sense of quieter awe including whispered sections.  The final movement, representing almost a third of the total work, will bring the work full force with big brass interjections and the growing anxiousness though it also seems to move toward an uneasy calm.  A huge major chord statement on the “Gloria Patri” is one of the most stunning moments of the piece.  While the style of the music seems at times a bit unusual for such a setting, the atmosphere and overall mood of the work certainly capture the anxiety that might exist rather than the more typical beatification.  For some the music will feel downright creepy, but the overall power of the work is undeniable.

    The concluding work, Kadisz, is a more recent piece and is intended to mark the 65th anniversary of the removal of Jews from Lodz’s Jewish ghetto.  The opening movement focuses on a soprano solo from a text by Abraham Cytryn, “Death moved from grave to grave”.  Set as a funeral march, the style is closer to the romantic-tinged orchestral writing of the composer’s current aesthetic.  The solo vocal writing is beautifully lyrical and has a rather Baroque feel at times.  This continues in the gorgeously set Jeremiah text for the chorus in the second movement.  This is not with some “sliding” in places, but the style is far more traditional overall.  A quite appropriate religious feel appears in the final movement with a cantor declaiming the Daniel text in melodic writing that bears Jewish musical inflections.  The orchestral serves mostly as a pedal point as the piece concludes with a series of fascinating “Amens”.  This is a moving work that feels just as personal as the earlier piece, but couched in a quite different musical language.  The music feels as if it moves from a more “contemporary” sense of the ghetto toward the more memorial feel of remembering the tragic loss of life there.

    Penderecki fans could not hope for a better conductor for this music than Antoni Wit who has proven himself time and again as one of the great interpreters of this music.  The Magnificat is a powerful  piece and this performance captures that very well.  The choirs are also well captured and balanced throughout the performance with the boys’ choir settling in after their first couple of entries.  This is indeed quite difficult music so the end results here create what may be one of the finer recordings of this music.  The Kadisz is an equally powerful work in the style that the composer has landed on these last couple of decades blending traditional writing with the sensibility and drama afforded him in more avant-garde styles earlier in his output.  This is a fascinating release of two modern choral masterpieces.