Orchestral Works Vol. 1

On belatedly catching up with Twin Peaks: The Return a few years ago, in the middle of its very striking eighth episode where a slow-motion monochrome nuclear explosion is accompanied by the sound of harshly screeching strings, I recognised the music right away as Krzysztof Penderecki's 'Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima'.

The 'Threnody' is among the pieces on this CD that I'd picked up in an anodyne small-town shopping-mall about twenty years ago. I'd been curious to hear it having previously read some reference to it (possibly by Lester Bangs) as an exemplary slice of horrible noise. I expected it to sound abrasive and discordant, but its expressive power caught me off-guard. It apparently took its composer by surprise too: beginning life as a something of an abstract piece, it was only when he first heard it performed that its "emotional charge" became apparent to him.

The main part of this disc is devoted to Penderecki's 3rd Symphony, a work completed in '95 that didn't grab my attention as much as the earlier and wilder compositions included here. Besides the 'Threnody' there is 'De Natura Sonoris II', part of which featured in the soundtrack to Kubrick's The Shining; and 'Fluorescences', where Penderecki coaxes an extraordinary racket out of an orchestra expanded to include such unconventional instrumentation as an alarm siren, cowbells, and a typewriter.

Comments

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...

This is a Recording

Search This Blog