Unsolicited Music Criticism, Obscure Polish Orchestral Division
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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.
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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.
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