Krzysztof Penderecki; Witold Lutosławski - String Quartets (Royal String Quartet)

Information

Composer: Krzysztof Penderecki; Witold Lutosławski

1. Penderecki - String Quartet No. 1
2. Penderecki - String Quartet No. 2
3. Penderecki - String Quartet No. 3 'Leaves of an unwritten diary'
4. Lutosławski - String Quartet: 1. Introductory
5. Lutosławski - String Quartet: 2. Main

Royal String Quartet
Izabella Szałaj-Zimak, violin
Elwira Przybyłowska, violin
Marek Czech, viola
Michał Pepol, cello

Date: 2013
Label: Hyperion
https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA67943

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Review

More home repertoire from the Polish quartet

After their impressive traversal of the Górecki quartets (6/11), the Royal Quartet return with two further seminal Polish figures. Penderecki’s string quartets throw the distinction between his earlier and later output into sharp relief. The initial two works are brief one-movement pieces reflecting current European developments: the First (1960) explores a wide range of timbres and textures over its series of unrelated ‘panels’, while the Second (1968) deploys the ‘sonorism’ then prevalent in Poland in music whose formal coherence is achieved almost in spite of its expressive fragmentation. Four decades on and the Third Quartet (2008), also in a single movement, reflects the pluralist idiom its composer had steadily been evolving – the more extended span taking in alternately elegiac and sardonic elements with an underlying sense of ideas being developed and transformed that places this work in a closer relationship to the classical archetype.

If none of these pieces ranks among Penderecki’s most significant, the same is hardly applicable to Lutosławski’s String Quartet (1964) which, coming after a period of overt experimentation, adopts a ground-plan of ‘introductory movement’ and ‘main movement’ that was to serve the composer well over the ensuing three decades. Moreover, its realisation as a sequence of four interdependent ‘mobiles’ (there being no actual full score) tests the ensemble’s powers of co ordination to the limit – the initial teasing out of subtle detail leading straight into music whose powerful expressive charge is then carried over into a prolonged leave-taking, with its vestigial allusion to previous and now only dimly remembered events.

Whatever this music’s challenges, the emotional disparities of Penderecki or the relative abstractions of Lutosławski, the Royal Quartet meet them head on. In the former composer, the Dafô Quartet offer more visceral if less refined listening while, in the latter, the Silesian Quartet offer comparable technical finesse but a less involving experience. Spacious and immediate sound, along with informative booklet-notes: those for whom the present coupling appeals should not hesitate.

-- Richard Whitehouse, Gramophone

More reviews:
BBC Music Magazine  PERFORMANCE: ***** / RECORDING: *****
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2013/May13/Penderecki_qtets_CDA67943.htm
http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=872345
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_cd_review.php?id=11060
https://www.thestrad.com/penderecki-string-quartets-nos1-2-and-3-leaves-of-an-unwritten-diary-lutoslawski-string-quartet/4290.article
https://www.amazon.com/Penderecki-Quartets-Nos-1-3-Lutoslawski-Quartet/dp/B00AOALWAS

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Krzysztof Penderecki (23 November 1933 – 29 March 2020) is a Polish composer and conductor. He studied music at Jagiellonian University and the Academy of Music in Kraków. Penderecki has composed four operas, eight symphonies and other orchestral pieces, a variety of instrumental concertos, choral settings of mainly religious texts, as well as chamber and instrumental works. Among his best known works are Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, Symphony No. 3, his St. Luke Passion, Polish Requiem, Anaklasis and Utrenja. In 2012, The Guardian called him the Poland's greatest living composer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krzysztof_Penderecki
http://www.krzysztofpenderecki.eu/en/

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Witold Lutosławski (25 January 1913 – 7 February 1994) was a Polish composer and orchestral conductor. He was one of the major European composers of the 20th century, and one of the preeminent Polish musicians during his last three decades. He earned many international awards and prizes. His compositions (of which he was a notable conductor) include four symphonies, a Concerto for Orchestra, a string quartet, instrumental works, concertos, and orchestral song cycles. Lutosławski's music incorporates his own methods of building harmonies and the use of aleatoric processes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Lutos%C5%82awski

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The Royal String Quartet was formed at the Warsaw Academy of Music in 1998. After 20 years of joint music-making, the Quartet has made 17 internationally acclaimed records, received six-time nominees and twice winners of the ‘Fryderyk’ award, given concerts on all continents and won themselves a loyal audience. The musicians started their collaboration with Hyperion Records in 2008, and has become leading ambassadors of the Polish culture. The ensemble’s recordings of quartets by Szymanowski, Różycki, Górecki, Penderecki and Lutosławski have been highly acclaimed by critics.
https://royalstringquartet.pl/

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