Moss: Orchestral and Chamber Works – Duczmal

Some names never quite cross the border. Piotr Moss studied with Grazyna Bacewicz in Warsaw, then went off to Paris to sit at the feet of Nadia Boulanger — that indispensable pedagogue who shaped half of twentieth-century music without writing much of her own — and he remains a rumor to most Western ears despite the pedigree. Penderecki gets the retrospectives. Lutoslawski gets the complete-cycle box sets. Moss gets a disc from Dux, distributed mostly to those who already know to look.

That’s a shame. On the evidence here he writes with a sure hand and an unfashionable willingness to let a string orchestra actually attack.

Elan, the opener, does what its title promises: six minutes of gripping, propulsive tension, the low strings digging in with a chesty, almost carnivorous attack that recalls Bernard Herrmann scoring a car chase. There’s Bartok’s night-music unease lurking underneath, some of Rawsthorne’s astringent Englishness, even a whiff of Franz Waxman’s Hollywood sheen filtered through Iron Curtain seriousness. It shouldn’t cohere. It does.

The Concertino for two violins, two string quartets, and double bass drags us back to 1984 and a rougher, more astringent Moss — angular, spiky, full of sinister slashes and pizzicati that seem to leap out sideways. Twenty-two minutes is a long time to sustain that kind of nervous energy, and there are stretches where the ear wants relief and doesn’t get it. But the piece never loses its argument. Romance is present, though badly bruised, filtered, as the annotator nicely puts it, through acid drizzle.

Canti, for flute and strings, is where Moss softens without going soft. Elzbieta Gajewska’s flute sings a genuinely cantabile line while the orchestra beneath her skitters, groans, hums, abrades. It’s a neat trick, surrounding lyric material with something closer to insect-noise, and it works because Moss never lets the accompaniment swallow the soloist. Gajewska floats above the turbulence with a tone that’s silvery without being thin.

Capriccio, with Véronique Briel at the keyboard, inhabits the same sound-world — dense, abrasive, unsettled — though the piano is granted more argumentative equality with the ensemble than the flute was. Around the four-minute mark grotesque humor intrudes, briefly, almost mockingly, before tragedy reasserts its claim. I found myself thinking of Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain, oddly enough, not for any resemblance of harmonic language but for that same sense of a solo instrument dreaming against an orchestral backdrop that refuses to stay picturesque. Falla’s gardens are scented; Moss’s have razor wire round them.

Fantaisie closes the program, with Andrzej Bauer drawing a full, dark, unforced tone from the cello, an instrument that, like the flute in Canti, is permitted to be itself, singing rather than merely negotiating with the orchestra’s static. The Amadeus Chamber Orchestra under Agnieszka Duczmal keeps busy underneath him, restless as an anthill somebody’s kicked. Then, around the seven-minute mark, something remarkable happens: the cello’s melancholy suddenly tips the whole ensemble into a waltz, unexpected and gone almost before you register it. I played that passage three times. It’s the most purely luminous sixty seconds on the disc, and Moss earns it precisely because he’s withheld anything like conventional beauty for the previous half hour.

Duczmal has been a tireless advocate for Polish music most of her career, and this Amadeus ensemble, based in Poznan, plays with the kind of committed, slightly rough-edged conviction you get from musicians who believe in what’s on the stand in front of them. The Dux engineering captures real body in the string tone, real bite in the attacks; nothing here sounds distant or apologetic.

This disc sits alongside two earlier Dux collections of Moss’s orchestral music (0839, 0820). Together they suggest that Polish composition after the war did not end with Penderecki’s clusters or Gorecki’s slow tragic arcs. Moss carved a lane of his own: nervous, virtuosic, unwilling to settle into either pure abrasion or pure lyricism. All five works here are world premiere recordings. Whether the disc converts newcomers to the cause of Piotr Moss, I can’t say. But it should. Recommended, with real enthusiasm, to anyone who thinks they already know the whole story of postwar Polish music.