This is a fascinating
disc as it brings together early and
late Penderecki, a composer whose early
‘avant garde’ style lurched suddenly
‘backwards’ in the late 1970s with the
neo-Romanticism of his First Violin
Concerto. While Penderecki’s First Violin
Sonata is, basically, an apprentice
piece, the Miniatures of a few years
later show him influenced by the avant-garde
of Darmstadt. The Second Sonata, from
2000, is an example of how Penderecki
can write in a modern idiom and yet
still appeal to a relatively large audience
through its mixture of drama and sonic
variety.
It’s no surprise that
the 20 year old composer’s Violin Sonata
(No. 1) should sound like Shostakovich
as the composer himself stated in an
interview:-
‘For three years,
my first teacher had me write in
a different style every week: a
piano piece in the style of Brahms,
next week Debussy, Beethoven, Honegger,
Chopin, and so on. I never really
wrote my own music … a violin-piano
sonata I wrote when I was twenty,
sort of in the style of Shostakovich.’
(Tom Pniewski, Penderecki at
Sixty - Poland's Global Voice,
www.worldandi.com/public/1993/november/ar02,
accessed May 2004)
I’m sure I can also
hear both Bartok and Szymanowski lurking
in the sonata and the Andante, in particular,
is fabulous. By the time of the Miniatures,
written six years later, the influential
voice – as the form suggests – is that
of Webern. However, he had moved beyond
imitating the masters to breaking conventions
in terms of the sounds that standard
instruments could make. He broke the
fetters of conventional musical notation
allowing him to create such early masterpieces
as his breakthrough piece, Threnody
for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960).
The major work on this
CD is the first recording of the recent
Second Sonata. As Penderecki’s fame
has grown, his composing has taken a
back seat to his conducting. In addition,
his increased popularity has resulted
in his being more suspiciously viewed
by the ‘critical establishment’. Nicholas
Reyland writes how Penderecki’s later
work has been characterised by a ‘broadstroke
approach’ that ‘carries the listener
(or viewer) along, no matter how foreign
or disorientating the immediate landscape
might be’ (Arks and Labyrinths,
http://www.ce-review.org/99/20/reyland20.html,
accessed May 2004). This isn’t simply
a case of elitist critics looking down
on a composer because he is popular;
the ‘broadstroke approach’ must inevitably
sacrifice subtlety for dramatic gesture
(there’s no reason why both cannot be
combined in music).
From a pragmatic viewpoint,
you either like the music or you don’t.
For listeners who are hesitant about
trying modern music then contemporary
Penderecki is an ideal starting place,
particularly via a Naxos bargain such
as this. I found the sonata a marvellous
piece and enjoyed the drama as well
as the longeurs of the nearly 13 minute
Adagio. The segue into the second movement
has the swagger of Schnittke and the
penultimate movement builds up to a
fantastic climax where the pianist suddenly
seems to lose her temper and smack down
a random discord; the concluding Andante
is more of a postlude.
The other piece on
the disc, the cadenza for his viola
concerto offers little when divorced
from its context; it’s little more than
a filler. Both the American artists,
Ida Bieler and Nina Tichman, play with
total commitment and no little skill
and are marvellous advocates for the
works. The recorded sound is excellent.
Nick Lacey
Ida Bieler, violin and Nina Tichman, piano 
