Panufnik Symphonies Volume 5 by CPO

Andrzej Panufnik spent the last four decades of his life in England, an exile from the Poland he’d fled in 1954, and something of that displacement — that rootedness in loss — runs through everything he wrote. He was never fashionable. The serialists dismissed him; the minimalists ignored him; the postmodernists didn’t know what to make of a composer who built his works on geometric pitch cells and sacred numerology yet somehow produced music of devastating emotional directness. CPO has been quietly, methodically putting that right, and this fifth volume of symphonic works is among the most rewarding yet.

Start with the hardest piece. Metasinfonia — Symphony No. 7 — is genuinely forbidding. Gothic is the right word for it: the organ doesn’t warm the texture so much as darken it further, and Michael Oberaigner’s timpani cuts through the string writing like something being chiseled rather than played. This is Panufnik at his most severe, and Łukasz Borowicz has the sense not to apologize for that. He lets the music be cold. The Konzerthausorchester Berlin strings sustain their pianissimos with extraordinary discipline — there are passages here where the sound seems to lose mass rather than volume, thinning to near-nothing before Jörg Strodthoff’s organ pedal restores some gravitational weight. Whoever shouted “Thank God!” at the premiere was not wrong, exactly. But neither were they entirely right.

The Sinfonia Votiva — Symphony No. 8 — is a different matter altogether, and frankly the reason to own this disc.

Panufnik wrote it after visiting the Black Madonna shrine at Częstochowa in 1980, the year Solidarity was born, and the music carries that weight without ever becoming programmatic. It proceeds — “evolutionary languor” understates it — through a first movement of almost geological patience, lines accumulating like strata, until the second movement breaks open with a violence that genuinely startles. Borowicz knows exactly where that pivot lives. He doesn’t lunge at it; it erupts. And then those final pages, where the bells decay into silence — niente, literally nothing — land with an authority that Seiji Ozawa’s famous Boston release, for all its refinement, never quite achieved. Ozawa’s version was coupled oddly with Roger Sessions on what felt like an afterthought of a disc; the Panufnik deserved better company, and it gets it here.

Concerto Festivo is the lighter companion, and lighter is relative — this is still a composer who can’t write a purely celebratory bar without some shadow passing across it. The outer movements have a percussive, edgy vitality; the middle movement’s string writing recalls the Sinfonia Sacra in its luminous, bell-like shimmer. There’s something in that sound — Panufnik’s strings in their more radiant mode — that brings Arvo Pärt to mind, though Panufnik got there first and with considerably more harmonic complexity. The piece doesn’t reach for the same altitude as the symphonies flanking it, but it earns its place.

Borowicz has been a reliable champion of Polish music — his Szymanowski with this same orchestra has impressed — and he clearly understands that Panufnik’s geometrical structures are not academic exercises but emotional architectures, designed to hold something real. The playing throughout is committed and technically polished without the self-conscious gleam that can make new music recordings feel like demonstrations rather than performances.

This is essential Panufnik. Buy it.