Penderecki and Lutoslawski Quartets – Royal String Quartet

Somewhere in Kraków there must still be a photograph of the young Penderecki looking positively ferocious — bow tie askew, hair uncombed, clutching a score that would soon terrify the LaSalle Quartet’s most adventurous listeners. That image comes to mind whenever String Quartet No. 1 starts up on a disc, and it starts up here with the kind of feral energy that makes you check the volume knob. Nine minutes, if that. Feels shorter. Feels like being mugged, politely, by four Poles with distinguished bow arms.

The Royal String Quartet — young, Warsaw-trained, unafraid — take this repertoire as their birthright, and why shouldn’t they. They grew up in a musical culture where sonorism wasn’t some avant-garde relic to be studied in a seminar but simply part of the air, the way Brahms was part of the air in old Vienna. You hear that familiarity in how unfussed they are by extended mastery. Col legno, harmonics, those glassy sul ponticello smears — none of it sounds like effortful special pleading. It sounds like speech.

The First Quartet dates from 1960, written in that white-hot moment when Polish composers were throwing off decades of enforced conservatism and discovering, almost gleefully, that a string quartet could shriek. The Second, from 1968, is tighter, more concentrated — eight minutes of an argument that never quite resolves, and isn’t meant to. Between the two you can hear Penderecki tightening his fist. Xenakis was in the air. So was Ligeti, though the two composers arrived at similar noise-worlds by different roads. The Royal players don’t over-sell the shock value; they let the material do the unsettling, which is the harder and better choice.

Then — and this is really why one buys the disc — comes the Third Quartet, subtitled Leaves of an Unwritten Diary, composed in 2008, some forty years after its predecessor and a full aesthetic universe away. Penderecki by then had circled back toward tonality, toward long Romantic paragraphs and melodies that actually want to be hummed, an evolution some critics have never forgiven him for and others regard as his deepest achievement. I lean toward the second camp, most days. This is a strange, wonderful piece — nineteen minutes that lurch from a slightly tipsy waltz (there’s something almost Shostakovich-ish about its sardonic lilt, maybe even a wink at Weinberg) into episodes of real tenderness, the kind of unguarded lyricism you don’t expect from the composer of Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. The Royal Quartet play it as if they’d commissioned it themselves. Rhythmic passages have real teeth; the work’s frequent emotional reversals — comic to desolate in the space of a phrase — never feel like non sequiturs, because the ensemble finds the connective tissue underneath.

Lutosławski’s solitary String Quartet, from 1964, is the disc’s other great document, and arguably the more historically consequential piece on the whole program. This is “controlled aleatorism” doing exactly what it was designed to do — giving each player rhythmic independence within tightly bounded pitch material, so that the music breathes unpredictably without ever losing its architecture. Two movements, twenty-five minutes, and an entirely different sound-world from Penderecki’s: less about assault, more about accumulation, cells of sound gathering like weather. The Royal Quartet handle the work’s peculiiar notation — no barlines through long stretches, players cued by gesture rather than downbeat — with an ease that belies how difficult this piece actually is to bring off in concert. I’ve heard performances where the aleatoric sections turn to mush. Not here. There’s a clarity to the inner voices, a sense that even the chaos has been rehearsed into shape without losing its air of spontaneity.

Does this album unseat the old guard? The Wilanów Quartet’s pioneering accounts, or the Varsovia’s Naxos cycle, both have historical claims worth respecting, and specialists in Polish string writing will want to keep those around for comparison. But as a single well-engineered disc that lets you trace an arc from raw sonoristic provocation to something like reconciled maturity, this one is hard to beat. The engineering favors bite over blend, which suits Penderecki fine and does no harm to Lutosławski either.

Get this if you want to understand what happened to the string quartet in Poland during the second half of the twentieth century — not as a history lesson, but as living, arguing, occasionally gorgeous music.