KILAR Angelus
Wojciech Kilar
Somewhere in the mountains above Zakopane, a fiddler is stamping out a rhythm that Bartók would have recognized in his bones. Wojciech Kilar heard it too, and never let it go, even as his colleagues in the Polish avant-garde were busy incinerating tonality in the crucible of Darmstadt.
That’s the paradox worth sitting with here. Kilar went through all the same motions as Penderecki and Górecki: Warsaw Autumn, the pilgrimage to Boulanger in Paris, the whole apparatus of postwar modernism. He came out the other side writing music that sounds, at its best, like folk ritual transfigured by orchestral imagination rather than abstraction for its own sake. Krzesany, from 1974, is the proof. Those opening string chords, dense and resonant, could almost be mistaken for Górecki’s Third Symphony a few years avant la lettre, the same tolling gravity, the same sense of harmonic weight pressing down like fog in a valley. But Kilar doesn’t linger there. He can’t help himself.
By the time you reach the stamping peasant dance around the ten-minute mark, earthy, percussive, almost violent in its physicality, you understand this is a composer who never really left the mountains, whatever Darmstadt did to his ear. The rhythmic unison passages that follow, rushing semiquavers biting against each other in tight dissonance, remind you he still has claws. This isn’t folklore prettified for the concert hall. It’s folklore radicalized, pushed until the barn dance turns into something closer to riot. And then, astonishingly, the composer just stops it. A long brass crescendo, and the whole thing is cut off, abrupt as a door slammed shut. No apology, no diminuendo. Kilar clearly enjoys leaving you mid-sentence.
Angelus inhabits an entirely different emotional planet. Here is where the disc becomes moving rather than merely impressive.
The opening is little short of eerie. Spoken text, alternating male and female voices, murmured almost sotto voce, builds across three and a half minutes of accumulating dread before the orchestra crashes in and the chorus starts shouting the name of Jesus like a crowd at a Corpus Christi procession that’s gotten out of hand. It’s a startling gesture, more theatrical than liturgical. You can hear why some listeners have found Kilar’s late religious music a touch cinematic. This is, after all, the man who gave Coppola’s Dracula its gothic, string-driven menace, and there’s no reason a composer shouldn’t let one language of expression bleed into another.
What redeems the piece is the solo soprano writing that follows. Rapt, plain, almost naked over string accompaniment and murmuring chorus, it has the simplicity that Górecki made a kind of theology in his Third Symphony, that hushed diatonic sincerity that either moves you or strikes you as merely comfortable, depending on your tolerance for holy minimalism. I confess it moved me. There’s something in the way the soprano line rises without hurry, unaccompanied by fuss, that feels earned rather than manufactured, particularly on second hearing, late at night, without the score in front of you to second-guess the harmony.
The performances do what they need to do. The choir has the heft for the climaxes and the poise for the hushed passages, no small feat given how exposed Kilar leaves his solo voice. Intonation problems would be merciless here, and there are none to speak of. The orchestral brass, when called upon to blaze, blaze without turning coarse. If there’s a criticism, it’s that occasionally the engineering favors bigness over inner clarity. In the loudest tuttis of Krzesany the semiquaver figuration can blur into a wash rather than register as the knotty, contrapuntal thing it actually is on the page.
Still. This is repertoire that deserves better circulation than it gets, sitting as it does in the shadow of Górecki’s ubiquity and Penderecki’s canonical status. Kilar was never quite fashionable enough for either camp, too tonal for the modernists, too muscular and folk-rooted for the minimalist crowd who embraced Górecki’s stillness wholesale. That in-between quality is exactly what makes him worth hearing. Recommended, and overdue.
