Nowak: String Quartet No. 1 and Polish Works

Polish music has not always traveled well to American ears. We know Penderecki and Lutosławski, we know Górecki’s Third Symphony — that long, slow exhale of grief that became, improbably, a pop phenomenon — but the generation that came after, born into a Poland already loosening from Soviet constraint, has remained largely unknown here. Aleksander Nowak, born in 1979, belongs to that generation. He studied in Katowice and later with Krzysztof Meyer, Ligeti’s former pupil, and the lineage matters: there is a Central European rigor in his language, an insistence on structural argument even when the surface sounds like barely controlled chaos.

And it does, sometimes, sound like that.

The opening of String Quartet No. 1 hits you with the full weight of Nowak’s aesthetic program — aggressive microtonal clusters, bows pressing into strings so hard you can almost feel the rosin dust, textures so dense they seem to absorb light rather than emit it. The Silesian Quartet, who commissioned and premiered this work, play it with the kind of conviction that only comes from having lived inside a piece for years. Their intonation in these chromatic thickets is extraordinary; staying precisely in tune while navigating quarter-tone inflections at speed is a different skill from conventional ensemble playing, closer to a tightrope act than a stroll.

But Nowak is too intelligent to sustain that assault indefinitely. He knows — and this is what separates the genuinely gifted from the merely ambitious — that contrast is not weakness. The quieter passages in the First Quartet arrive like clearings in dense forest. Suddenly the texture opens, the bow pressure eases, and something almost lyrical surfaces, tentative and fragile. Then the density closes back in. It is an effective narrative strategy, and it keeps the listener from simply going numb.

Quantemporette, the chamber piece for clarinet, trombone, cello, and piano, is an odder animal. The title is Nowak’s own coinage — quantum, temporal, quartette folded together — which either tells you everything or nothing, depending on your patience for composer wordplay. What the title cannot convey is the peculiar social dynamic of this instrumental combination: the clarinet skittering in high registers while the trombone plants its weight in the low brass, the piano functioning less as a harmonic anchor than as a percussion instrument, the cello threading between them all. Arkadiusz Adamski and Tomasz Hajda negotiate the constant registral extremes with remarkable agility. There are moments when the trombone’s slides — actual glissandi, not the approximations of less committed players — create something genuinely unsettling, a queasy sense of pitch itself becoming unstable.

String Quartet No. 2, from 2011, is the longest work here and arguably the most assured. The argument feels more spacious, the dissonances more purposefully placed, the silences — and Nowak uses silence the way a playwright uses pause — more eloquent. This is music that has digested its Ferneyhough and its Lachenmann without simply becoming either of them.

Then there is Ulica Spokojna 3 — “3 Peaceful Street” — for eight cellos, played by the Warsaw Cellonet Group. The title is the address of the building in Kraków where Nowak was born, and whatever autobiographical weight that carries, the music itself is remarkably still by comparison with everything else on the disc. Eight cellos can produce a sound of tremendous, almost suffocating warmth, and Nowak exploits that quality with something approaching tenderness. It is the most immediately accessible thing here, and not the worse for it.

None of this is easy listening. That phrase gets deployed too often as both warning and insult, and I mean it as neither. Music that asks something of you — attention, patience, a willingness to sit inside an unfamiliar sound world long enough to learn its grammar — is not punishing you. It is treating you as an adult. The Silesian Quartet has a distinguished track record with Polish contemporary music; their recent survey of Zbigniew Bargielski’s quartets on this same label showd their commitment to this repertoire, and their advocacy here is no less persuasive. Nowak is not yet a household name, even in households where Szymanowski is played after dinner. He should be better known. This disc is a strong argument for paying attention.