WOJCIECH KILAR: Piano Concerto; Choral Prelude for string orchestra; Orawa – Peter Jablonski, piano/ Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra/ Wojciech Rajski – Dux 0708 [Distr. by Qualiton], 50:47 ****½:
Even if you haven’t run into the music of Wojciech Kilar in the concert hall or on disc, you may have heard it in another context: the movie theater. Kilar wrote the music for more than 150 films, including some pretty high-profile ones such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. Unlike his older colleagues Nino Rota and Miklós Rózsa, however, Kilar is just as highly valued as a composer of classical music.
Like that of his contemporary Krzysztof Penderecki, Kilar’s early career established him as a torchbearer of the Polish musical avant-garde. And just like Penderecki’s, Kilar’s musical idiom underwent a significant change in the 1970s. His style became increasingly simple and accessible as he turned to Polish folk music and traditional music of the Catholic Church for his inspiration. Both sources of inspiration inform his Choral Prelude of 1988. The piece is in three parts marked Dolce, Misterioso, and Più largo. As these markings indicate, the music is predominantly quiet and inward, with a spiritual bent, though layered dynamics and, toward the end, a slowly building dissonance give the work variety. As in others of his pieces, Kilar draws on the modal quality of the folk music of the mountainous Podhale region in Poland.
The Lydian mode characteristic of this music is even more in evidence in Orawa, one of Kilar’s best-known pieces and one of the composer’s personal favorites. The music starts quietly but like the Choral Prelude builds in dynamic intensity until it reaches a fevered climax; at the end of the piece, the members of the orchestra shout as villagers might at the end of a lively folk dance.
It took a long time for Kilar to live one of his dreams, namely to write a piano concerto. The concerto, dedicated to Swedish pianist Peter Jablonski, debuted in 1997 and evinces an even greater simplification in Kilar’s style, a clear debt to minimalism. In fact, I thought the tedious repetitions with which the concerto begins were going to send me searching for my Steve Reich recordings to give me some relief, but then I began to appreciate the organic nature of the piece, its slow sure unfolding from the static Preludium to the hushed religiosity of the Chorale to the wild abandon of the final Toccata. As I listened, I wondered if Kilar had Bartók’s Third Concerto in mind as he wrote his concerto. The Bartók has the same kind of trajectory: a sedate opening movement followed by a slow movement marked Adagio religioso capped by a vivacious finale with folkloric overtones. Except that Kilar’s finale is a take-no-prisoners whirlwind in which both piano and orchestra are treated percussively, the pianist flailing away at the keyboard, the orchestra answering with loud curt ostinato phrases. If the movement recalls Bartók, it recalls an earlier, barbaro Bartók. And if it doesn’t keep you on the edge of your seat, nothing will!
Jablonski and the Polish Radio Symphony play as if their lives depended on making as grand and garish a noise as they can, and Dux’s close-up, high-level recording aids and abets fully. That cymbal crash, those bass drum thwacks register with lightning-and-thunder immediacy. I might have preferred a bit of distance between the performers and me, but there’s no denying the sheer power on display. Quite a shift of gears to the first movement (Dolce) of the Choral Prelude. It’s just as attractively and sympathetically rendered, as is all this music.
At a little over fifty minutes, the recording may be short measure, though, and I wish Dux had included another work or two, perhaps Kilar’s Krzensany, which spearheaded the composer’s movement toward a more accessible style. By the way, Kilar’s Piano Concerto is also available in a Naxos recording with Waldemar Malicki and the always-reliable Antoni Wit. I haven’t heard their performance, but I can’t imagine they outdo Jablonski and company.
—Lee Passarella
1933 Les chefs proscrits – Ernst Viebig, Conductor – Forgotten Records
A fine conductor, unfortunately suppressed by the vicious political climate of the ’30s