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 20^th 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 20^th 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.

Baxter: Resistance
Melissa Wertheimer, flute. Andrew Stewart, piano.
Nicholas Currie, violin. Diana Greene, piano.
Kenny Baik, saxophone. Bonghee Lee, piano.
Azimuth String Quartet
Arabesque Duo
West Shore Piano Trio
Navona Records 6206
Total Time:  76:45
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

A variety of performers have been assembled to explore the chamber music of composer Garth Baxter (b. 1946).  He is known for his output of art songs, but also has written for a variety of large- and small-scale forces.  The latter are the focus here.  His music tends to follow a more traditional bent of lyricism and tonality.  Ten works are featured on this new release.  Essentially the album is in two halves with the larger quartet or trios bringing each to a fitting close.

Three works for solo and piano get us started.  The Silver Run opens the album.  It is a two-movement work for flute and piano that features a gorgeous soaring line in the opening “Idyll”.  This carries through into the following “Cascading” which has a slightly more flowing quality to connect with this depiction of a Maryland landscape.  The remainder of the pieces are single-movement works exploring a particular emotional quality.  Could You Dream What I Dream has an accompaniment that features slightly more open harmonies with flashes of romanticism while the violin line moves across them with an outward-reaching lyrical line that has a decided poignancy.  A similar reflective sensibility casts itself across Des Larmes Encadrees for saxophone and piano.  There are some similarities to the way the music is laid out, but here a few interesting little harmonic shifts add some spice to this at times romantic and plaintive blend.  Later a more romantic work for violin and piano, Il Y a Longtemps serves as the centerpiece for two solo piano works that match this warm tonal and accessible style.

There are several works for piano here played by Andrew Stewart as well.  The first of these lends the album its title, Resistance.  The music here takes a turn towards a slightly more dissonant, and sinuous harmony that is slightly formed with jazz ballad qualities.  It moves with clear thematic writing in a slightly more intricate style than what preceded it on the album.  The piece moves through moments of intense dissonance that gives way to modern romantic reflections.  The Romance Without Words is unabashedly romantic with glances back to a bygone era while the Ballade for a Princess is inspired by a Chopin work.  The music here tends to incorporate a bit more dissonance that opens up to some rather beautiful harmonic arrival points in an overall dramatic, and substantial 9-minute work that moves through several episodes.

The Azimuth String Quartet explores the more dramatic MacPherson’s Lament.  The piece takes its inspiration from a 17^th-Century tune written by the Scottish fiddler and outlaw James MacPherson.  The piece is a bit more intricate here as the tune is woven into the fabric of the piece creating an often pained dramatic quality that is somewhat quaint but somber as well.  The penultimate track features a piece for guitars featuring the Arabesque Duo.  Edgefield is a very nice change of pace with the two guitars exploring Baxter’s engaging melodic idea with interesting harmonic shifts that send it in new directions.  It is a rather beautiful reflective work.  Finally, the West Shore Piano Trio moves us back to depictions of landscapes in From the Headwaters.   Here too are the explorations of late romantic style with modern harmonic twists that are aided by engaging lyricism.

This is a very accessible collection of chamber music whose variety is aided by the different combinations explored here.  Baxter’s music certainly has its ear set on tonal harmony but there is a nice sense of shape to these pieces with both pieces that are dramatic and intense, and others that provide a rather relaxed setting.  At times, his music recalls the more Classical moments of Claude Bolling’s various works for solo instruments, though here jazz rhythms and styles are not the direction Baxter’s music takes.  The sound has a more immediate feel, sometimes a little drier acoustically.  But, with the various locales used, it tends to be consistently engineered unobtrusively from location to location.  The music here is perfect for a more relaxed listening experience requiring one to only get lost in Baxter’s melodic invention.