Krzysztof Penderecki - St. Luke Passion (Antoni Wit)

Information

Composer: Krzysztof Penderecki

• St. Luke Passion

Izabela Kłosińska, soprano

Adam Kruszewski, baritone

Romuald Tesarowicz, bass

Krzysztof Kolberger, evangelist

Jarosław Malanowicz, organ

Warsaw Boys Choir

Warsaw National Philharmonic Choir

Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra

Antoni Wit, conductor

Date: 2003

Label: Naxos

https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.557149

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Review

Naxos’s Penderecki expert steers a sure, dramatic course through a 1960s classic

The St Luke Passion is an obvious candidate for the Naxos Penderecki series, and I was particularly interested to hear how the ever-resourceful Antoni Wit would handle it. As I suggested in connection with the Dabringhaus and Grimm recording under Marc Soustrot, the piece has worn rather less well than that other major choral composition of the 1960s, Britten’s War Requiem, with its more obvious ambiguities and secular resonances: and the intense, economical treatment of the Passion story found in Arvo Pärt’s Passio, and other examples of so-called ‘holy minimalism’, now seem rather more compelling as settings of sacred texts than Penderecki’s alternations of drifting understatement and rather blatant bombast.

Wit has chosen to stress the contrasts between these different modes of expression, and his expansive reading is closer in spirit as well as timing to the composer’s own version than to the more tautly projected Soustrot. Wit’s reading, like Penderecki’s, tends to draw attention to the music’s lack of melodic flow, and its reliance on a narrow repertory of technical devices of the kind which seemed much more original and effective in 1967 than they do today. It’s the relatively brief moments of almost expressionistic drama (especially those surrounding the death of Christ) which come off best, aided by a pungently immediate recording, complete with rasping organ and blazing brass. (The recording was not made in a cathedral but in Warsaw’s Philharmonic Hall.)

The soloists are all excellent – a pity that they don’t have more to do – and the large chorus copes well, if not always with ideal spontaneity. Given the importance of the spoken narration, the absence of text and translation is particularly unfortunate, though Richard Whitehouse’s track-cued synopsis is certainly better than nothing.

-- Arnold Whittall, Gramophone

More reviews:
ClassicsToday  ARTISTIC QUALITY: 10 / SOUND QUALITY: 10

MusicWeb International  BARGAIN OF THE MONTH

http://www.classical.net/music/recs/reviews/n/nxs57149a.php

https://www.allmusic.com/album/krzysztof-penderecki-st-luke-passion-mw0001842744

https://www.amazon.com/St-Luke-Passion-PENDERECKI/dp/B0000DJEM2

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Krzysztof Penderecki (23 November 1933 – 29 March 2020) was a Polish composer and conductor. He studied music at Jagiellonian University and the Academy of Music in Kraków. Penderecki 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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Antoni Wit (born February 7, 1944 in Kraków) is a Polish conductor. He studied with Henryk Czyż, Krzysztof Penderecki and Nadia Boulanger. He has recorded over 90 albums, most of them for the Naxos label, and many of them with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice, of which he managed and was artistic director from 1983 to 2000. Since year 2002 he has been music director of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. Wit specializes in the works of Polish composers such as Henryk Gorecki, Witold Lutosławski, Karol Szymanowski and Krzysztof Penderecki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Wit

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