The Royal String Quartet, photo: Blow Up
The Royal String Quartet's latest release on the Hyperion label, Penderecki & Lutosławski String Quartets, presents the Polish composers' works in the genre. Another recent project, Nowa Warszawa, exposes tough love for Warsaw, in classic songs with performance doyenne Stanisława Celińska and pianist-arranger Bartek Wąsik.
The RSQ's pairing of Krzysztof Penderecki and Witold Lutosławski makes again the comparative case for Poland's two innovative voices in classical music of the late 20th century - and beyond - who shared much and differed in their techniques and directions. The works from the 1960s disrupted conventions during that musically and socially volatile era. The inclusion of Penderecki's String Quartet No. 3 (2008), written some three decades after he left the avant-garde world in which he achieved acclaim, gives the new disc added resonance as the composer's 80th birthday is celebrated internationally.
The radical sound world Penderecki was exploring by 1960 leaps into play from the opening moments of String Quartet No. 1: extreme bowing and percussive techniques, deployed with precise tempi and contained dynamics by the RSQ members. (Another revelation is the Hyperion disc's limpid sound, which reveals space and depth among the four instruments.) Those quiet dynamics illuminate the startling musical language. They come again at the conclusion of String Quartet No. 2, which uses more conventional approaches to the instruments – though not to Penderecki's sonorism, which proved melodic development a dispensable musical aspect. At 8 minutes, it is almost as brief as Quartet No. 1, a concision that complements the brash, almost ruthless confidence of the pieces.
String Quartet No. 3, commissioned by the Shanghai String Quartet, was premiered in 2008 at the festival of Penderecki's music commemorating his 75th birthday. The vigour remains, though what's now radical is the composer's use of conventional harmony and themes. RSQ's violist, Marek Czech, takes the early exposition. The quartet is an expressive piece, and an important pieces of chamber music from a composer widely known for symphonic and large-ensemble works. Another melody appears late, alluding to a theme he knew from his father in childhood, and gives the piece its subtitle: "Leaves from an Unwritten Diary". In liner notes, musician and author Adrian Thomas - whose blog On Polish Music is a crucial guide and commentary to the field - contends that "the restless switching from one idea or tempo to the next" is characteristic in both of Penderecki's major phases. The startling provocations of the first two quartets and the earnest expression of the third, however, sound worlds – or perhaps epochs - apart.
Lutosławski's String Quartet is his single work in the genre – as with Penderecki, he was not prolific in chamber music. Written in 1964, after he began working with controlled aleatorism, it features the rhythmically loosened style that helped define his later work. Composed yet with open in structure, Lutosławski, "was trying to give back to the players their expressive role in the music", as the conductor Steven Stucky states in an online discussion.
Divided into two movements (a form also seen in the Hesitant and Direct sections of Symphony No. 2, composed just after the String Quartet), the piece reaches an extraordinary apex almost halfway into the 15-minute second movement. Furious, impassioned, the violins are joined by viola and cello – the RSQ players render the titanic force with a shattering intensity. What their performance reveals is the liberated quality noted in Stucky's comment: the vitality of brilliantly composed music that allows interpretive latitude to the musicians performing it. The piece slows, becomes only more compelling, halting and seeking. As the String Quartet quiets and concludes, it exposes its rare form, delicate yet with a rigour reliant on the opening exposition.
Warsaw's hard-nosed pop
In another aspect of their music making, the RSQ plays songs about Warsaw sung by the legendary performer Stanisława Celińska and arranged by pianist Bartek Wąsik. The new disc, Nowa Warszawa, is co-produced by the Nowy Teatr in Warsaw - where Celińska is a company member, having worked with director Krzysztof Warlikowski since 1998 - and Polish Radio. Celińska is a performer with rare force of personality, delivering diverse lyrics about her home city within the RSQ's revolving motifs. Wąsik contributes reserved, penetrating piano, and arranged the popular tunes to frame her gruff confidence in settings for string quartet. A graduate of the Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, as are the RSQ members, he is a founding member of the Lutosławski Piano Duo and Kwadrofonik, a piano-percussion quartet specialising in modern and contemporary music.
The instrumental version of David Bowie and Brian Eno's song Warszawa from 1977 opens the disc - a station break on a train from Moscow to Berlin gave Bowie a few minutes in the city's central station, inspiring the solemn ode. A 1990s rock song by T. Love, the band led by Muniek Staszczyk, sets the insistent lyrical tone of Nowa Warszawa. The collection is an extended love song, given the understanding that it's melancholic, devastated, bitter love that's being declared. Critical paeans to the city call it hard names: ugly, sad, dirty, grey, cold, the people nasty, not friendly, often sloshed on vodka... With all that said, it's a town that wins back a very specific devotion.
Celińska is studied and droll on Bal na Gnojnej, which alludes to a dance and to a street named Crap Ball Street. Languid, inexorably structured, the haunting song dangles her voice in isolated self-reflexion, then the quartet returns to a dragging, threatening phrase. Pokoik no Hożej / Room on Hoża Street has lyrics from the poet Julian Tuwim; another great poet, Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, wrote Deszcz / Rain with the renowned pianist Władysław Szpilman, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Warsaw Uprising (Szpilman then returned to his career at Polish Radio and wrote memoirs that were adapted into Roman Polanski's Oscar-laureate film, The Pianist).
Nowa Warszawa navigates its loaded material with a canny theatrical grace. One track, Tango Warszawa, reveals a cultural comparison by coopting the music of Buenos Aires and Montivideo. Written by jazzman Stanisław Soyka with lyrics by Agnieszka Oseicka (another major performing-arts personality), it picks up strands of musical and cultural DNA through pitiless lyrics and rhythms the RSQ conveys without anything so obvious as drums.
Celińska was born in 1947 in Praga, the working-class district across the Vistula River from central Warsaw. Today, Praga is home to an intriguing scene of galleries, cafes and boutiqes, and the National Stadium opened last year on a mound of postwar rubble that used to host a huge open-air flea market. She embodies the deeper history, however: occasionally tender at times, her relation to these songs is from heart and spleen. Trained in acting, she worked with remarkable directors including Edwin Axer and Tadeusz Łomnicki, and began her film career with Andrzej Wajda before graduating, on Landscape After Battle (1970), his crucial film of the postwar displacements. Acclaim also came in 1969 at a long-standing festival in which actors peformed as singers, in the city of Opole, Poland; her subsequent work for Polish Radio is featured on the broadcaster's recent Gold Collection edition dedicated to her.
This blending of genres runs through the Nowa Warszawa project. Rock and pop pieces are set in a recital style. The Royal String Quartet and pianist Wąsik bring conservatory training to bear on popular and radio songs, as many classical musicians have over the decades at Polish Radio in Warsaw, including Szpilman and Witold Lutosławski. Deadly earnest, absorbingly entertaining, the project describes a survivor's city "where Hitler and Stalin did their work", as Celińska sings on T. Love's Warszawa, the collection's most recent track. Warsaw's earned its right to be celebrated so honestly, by poets and performers making bold about its justifiably jaded nature.
The Royal String Quartet – violinists Izabella Szałaj-Zimak and Elwira Przybyłowska, violist Marek Czech, cellist Michał Pepol - formed at Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw in 1998. They have been Quartet in Residence at Queen's University Belfast since 2012. Their new Hyperion disc, Penderecki & Lutosławski String Quartets, was released on the 25th of February 2013, and they programmed the Lutosławski String Quartet on a U.K. tour in February 2013. Previous Hyperion releases by the RSQ are of Karol Szymanowski's two quartets, along with Ludomir Różycki's String Quartet in D minor, and the complete quartets of Henryk Górecki. This focus on Polish repertoire is a significant part of the quartet's work, and extends from masterworks to commissions, with a new work being written for them by the eminent composer Paweł Szymański.
Stanisława Celińska, Bartek Wąsik and the Royal String Quartet tour Nowa Warszawa in Poland in March, playing on the 5th of March in Łódż at Teatr Powszechny at 7:15 pm, at ATM Studio in Warsaw on the 7th of March at 8 pm, and at Teatr Polski in Wrocław on the 19th of March at 8 pm.
For further details (in Polish), see: http://www.nowyteatr.org/pl/event/nowa-warszawa