August 26, 2019

  • Atma Quartet Debuts With 3 Significant Polish Quartets

     

    Penderecki/Szymanowski/Panufnik
    Atma Quartet
    Accord 252
    Total Time:  46:32
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    For their debut album release, the recently-formed Atma String Quartet has chosen three works from their homeland.  The Polish quartet is tackling three works by some of Poland’s greatest 20th Century composers.  Each work presents a unique musical approach and the sort of highly personal language that creates an intimacy always found in a composer’s chamber music.  The pieces here span almost a century of musical history, though two are more recent pieces.

    The album begins with the second quartet of Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937).  Perhaps the second great Polish composer of note after Chopin.  His music slowly began to gain more attention beyond his homeland as the 20th Century came to a close.  The 1927 quartet followed on the heels of his impressive Stabat Mater setting and the more familiar Mazurkas, Op. 50.  The work was submitted to a competition organized by the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia.  Szymanowski’s work would lose out to Bartok and Casella.  It would be several years before the quartet would be published but its 1929 Warsaw premiere was evidently impressive.  The piece is tightly constructed and cast in three movements.  The first is somewhat like a sonata-allegro structure with two thematic ideas and a recapitulation of sorts.  The lyrical first idea has a rather haunting quality to it.  Szymanowski’s aesthetic blends a modernist harmonic sensibility with an almost impressionistic exploration of color.  It is in this latter quality where some of his more beautiful, personal writing appear.  The central movement is a colorful scherzo which opens with a burst of dissonance and pizzicato in a movement that also seems to find its rhythms in folk music. In the finale movement, we move into emotional depths with an intense “Lento” that culminates in a fugato.  The music becomes more and more emotionally intense as it progresses in an excellent dramatic conclusion.  The Atma Quartet manages to capture Szymanowski’s lyrical writing and dramatic intent perfectly shifting to bring out the bursts of intense emotional energy that occur in the work.  It makes for an impressive start to the release.

    At the center of the release is one of the last works of Andrzej Panufnik (1914-1991).  His String Quartet No. 3 (1990) bears the subtitle “Paper Cuts” and is drawn from a folk art of Poland where abstract designs are created with paper.  The piece is cast in five brief movements (the whole work barely times out at ten minutes).  Each movement focuses on a specific technique or performance requirement.  The opening slow movement is based on a rhythmic canon structured on the harmonics of the note “G”.  The focus here is on control of dynamics and challenges the performers to not stress any given note.  Lyrical writing is set against rhythmical challenges in movement two.  A playful scherzando follows that explores pizzicato and dynamic “terraces”.  Speed and ensemble become the focus of the fourth movement marked “prestissimo possibile”.  The final movement, in arch form, explores the lower registers with swells of dynamics from pianissimo to fortissimo.  The result here is an equally abstract musical essay of intense writing that falls in that atonal modern realm, though the result is not perhaps as cerebral as it might sound in this often tight-knit set of musical explorations.

    Finally, the group presents Krzystof Penderecki’s String Quartet No. 3 (2008).  The subtitle, Leaves of an Unwritten Diary, helps the listener enter into this rather episodic work that feels like the composer pulling together random thoughts and remembrances that the quartet is paging through.  There is this sense of discovery and memory being placed hand-in-hand here.  In some respects, this is the most traditional sounding of Penderecki’s work.

    The Atma Quartet tackles each of these pieces with an extremely-commanding attention to the sort of detail required.  They manage to also set apart each work in a way that helps it stand out as an unique musical voice.  This is not just a series of clinical musical experiments.  The Panufnik could certainly come across that way but does not here.  The Penderecki is a work that stretches the group well with the sort of attention to rhythmic detail, already well displayed in the previous works, coupled with a perfect intonation, especially in the extreme registers.  The tightness of the ensemble also is a mark of great things to come from this group in this very impressive debut of important works in the repertoire.