Unsolicited Music Criticism, Obscure Polish Orchestral Division

Karol Szymanowski’s greatest hit is a Stabat Mater that I still haven’t listened to, but I’m hooked on his Fourth Symphony (1932), also titled “Symphonie concertante” and shaped like a piano concerto more than anything else. There’s a lot of Bartok in it, percussive timbres and folky themes, but Szymanowski’s more of a late romantic composer at heart – big expressive high points, and a splashy finale. The first movement has a kind of oriental-exotic sparkle to it, which Andsnes and Rattle ratchet up into a somewhat demented energy in this recording, à la the Ravel Left Hand Concerto. (The first recording of this I heard was more earnest and straightforward, and it works that way too.) Totally convincing piece, melodies you remember, late romantic style in a distinctive voice – this is one of those pieces which should get performed a lot more often.

The two violin concertos are fine, too, especially the second one (1933), which weaves a lot of music out of relatively simple melodic material & never gives up its restless energy. It bears a family resemblance to the Bartok Violin Concerto No.2 (which it predates by a few years) but has a more tightly cabled-together intensity, instead of Bartok’s soaring expansiveness.

Andrzej Panufnik died in 1991 and most of his orchestral performances apparently followed behind him, which is a real shame – especially in his later music, he wrote in a strongly unique compositional voice and could control a big orchestral palette with unusual sensitivity. His Ninth Symphony (“Sinfonia della Speranza” = Symphony of Hope, 1986/1990), as a one-movement 40-minute landscape, doesn’t exactly figure to spark a popular Panufnik revival anywhere, but at least there’s a recording that Panufnik made with the London Symphony, reissued a couple of months ago.

The symphony begins with a broadly sweeping, hymn-like melody, gradually turning over a series of small melodic shapes, while brass instruments shadow it with trills and tattoos on sustained chords built out of the same harmonic stuff. True to Panufnik’s form, the rest of the symphony is built out of carefully related variations on the same musical material. Similarly broad melodies metamorphose gradually between instrumental groups and registers, become more impassioned and build to climaxes that evaporate suddenly into quiet stillness. In the middle it all explodes into angry Stravinskian churning for a while; the symphony reverses course and follows an arch back to an inverted version of the original hymn.

Anyway, it’s good, and expresses a kind of thoughtful reverence that not a lot of composers aimed for, much less hit upon. Here’s hoping that some conductor revives it eventually.

Panufnik’s Piano Concerto from 1962, also on the disc, is growing on me too – the slow movement has some crystalline, almost-completely-still moments that are really something special.