Penderecki: Piano and Flute Concertos – Barry Douglas

Krzysztof Penderecki has outlived nearly every label anyone ever pinned on him, and that is the most remarkable fact of his career. The enfant terrible of Warsaw who terrified Darmstadt with clusters and glissandi in the early 1960s became, by the time he was writing for Barry Douglas and the Warsaw Philharmonic decades later, something closer to a late-Romantic in modernist’s clothing. Naxos has made it their business — admirably, doggedly — to document the whole arc, and this latest disc catches him at his most emotionally exposed.

The Piano Concerto, subtitled Resurrection, wears its origins on its sleeve, or nearly does. Penderecki began it before September 11, 2001, and the finished score inevitably absorbed the shock of that morning — he has said as much, though he resists being too literal about it. What comes through is grief handled without sentimentality: ten linked movements, played without pause, moving from tolling bass sonorities up through episodes of real violence to a peroration that refuses easy consolation. Douglas, who gave the 2007 revision its premiere, plays with weight rather than glitter. His octaves in the darker episodes have a granite quality — not always pretty, exactly right. Wit conducts as though he has lived inside this score for years, which by 2010 he probably had; the brass have that slightly raw, unblended Eastern European sound that suits Penderecki’s harmonic language far better than anything smoother from Berlin or Vienna would.

The Flute Concerto is the odd, lovely surprise here.

Written in 1992 for chamber orchestra, it belongs to Penderecki’s so-called neo-Romantic period, and it is tonal in the way his Violin Concerto No. 2, Metamorphoses, is tonal — which is to say, tonal with memory, harmony recalled rather than assumed. Lukasz Dlugosz, still in his twenties when he recorded this, plays with a silvery, unforced tone that never pushes. There’s a long central paragraph — a kind of pastoral suspended in amber — where he barely seems to breathe, the phrasing is so continuous. I kept thinking of the composer’s own remark, decades earlier, that he wanted eventually to write music people could love without embarrassment. This concerto is the proof of that ambition realized, and realized without cynicism.

Whether it displaces existing recordings is a fair question. There isn’t much competition, frankly — this repertoire hasn’t been fought over by rival flautists the way Nielsen or Ibert has, and Dlugosz’s account may simply become the reference by default. That would be no injustice.

The Partita, tucked in with these two later works, comes from an entirely different Penderecki, the 1971 avant-gardist scoring for harpsichord, electric guitar, bass guitar, harp, double bass, and orchestra — an ensemble that sounds, on paper, like a fever dream from a Radio Warsaw studio session circa 1972, and sounds that way on disc too, gloriously. The harpsichord clatters against amplified guitar in a way that must have alarmed subscription audiences of the day; revised in 1991, it has lost none of its capacity to unsettle. It’s included here almost as a historical corrective, a reminder of where this composer came from before he arrived at the plush certainties of the Piano Concerto. Some collectors will find the juxtaction jarring. I found it clarifying.

Wit’s conducting throughout has that unglamorous authority he brings to nearly everything he does with this orchestra — no interpretive vanity, just complete comprehension of the idiom, which after all is his own. The engineering, done across two different Warsaw halls a year apart, integrates surprisingly well; you would not easily guess these sessions were not contiguous.

Penderecki was not yet finished evolving when he wrote any of this — he never really finished evolving, full stop, right up until his death in 2020 — but this disc captures a composer secure enough in his late maturity to risk sounding radiant. That was once the last accusation anyone expected to level at him. Recommended, and warmly.