Szymanowski Stabat Mater and Penderecki – Gielen

There is a moment about four minutes into “Stała Matka boleściwa” — the third movement of the Szymanowski — where the solo soprano floats a phrase over string tremolos so soft they barely exist, and the whole apparatus of the modern symphony orchestra seems to dissolve into something older, something votive. Get that moment right and you have the piece. Get it merely accurate and you have an orchestral run-through with words attached. Michael Gielen, on this ORFEO reissue drawn from Vienna Konzerthaus tapes made between 1995 and 2000, gets it accurate.

I don’t say that lightly. Gielen was one of the great musical intelligences of the postwar era, a man who could make Mahler sound like Webern and Webern sound inevitable, who conducted Boulez as if it were Brahms and Brahms as if it had just been composed. His analytical powers were legendary. You always heard things in a Gielen reading you’d missed in twenty others. But analysis cuts both ways, and Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater — completed in 1926, the composer’s own favorite among his works, the piece he was reportedly moved to call, on finishing it, the first really radiant thing he’d written — does not yield its secrets to X-ray vision alone. It wants blood. It wants the specific ache of a man writing consolation for his sister after she lost her daughter, filtered through Polish highland modality and a harmonic language indebted equally to Debussy and to the wooden churches of Zakopane.

Gielen gives us the modality, the harmony, every inner voice of that extraordinary opening orchestral paragraph. Its bitonal wandering, murky and troubled, is laid out with almost cruel clarity. What he withholds is the sense of a person suffering. The soprano soloist, Ewa Iżykowska, a capable if not especially individual voice, sings cleanly, in tune, and without much sense that she is Mary at the foot of the cross rather than a singer executing a well-rehearsed line. Elena Moşuc, a more starry name, contributes elsewhere; Annette Markert’s mezzo has warmth but little desolation. The choruses — Chorus sine nomine and the Wiener Konzertchor combined — sing with good blend and horrible restraint, as if someone had asked them to keep their voices down in a library. Szymanowski’s climaxes, especially the great choral outburst of the sixth movement, need abandon. Here they get discipline.

I kept thinking of Simon Rattle’s Birmingham disc, or further back to Karol Stryja’s Katowice version, where the sheer vocal opulence papers over structural untidiness but delivers the visceral punch this score exists to provide. Gielen corrects the untidiness and loses the punch. It is, in the end, a trade I don’t want made for me.

And then, astonishingly, the disc turns a corner.

The Penderecki performances that follow, Dies Irae from 1967 and the Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima from 1961, are among the most viscerally unsettling accounts of either piece I have encountered on disc. I confess I’ve never been an easy convert to Penderecki’s sonorism; the tone clusters and screaming string glissandi can feel, in lesser performances, like effects in search of a purpose. Not here. Gielen’s very qualities of cool structural command, the qualities that shortchanged Szymanowski, turn out to be exactly what this repertoire requires. The Threnody‘s opening wall of massed string noise arrives with a physical shock, tuned with a precision that makes the dissonance more disturbing, not less. You can hear the seams between the 52 individual string lines Penderecki demands, each one audible as an act of individual suffering inside the collective mass. It’s harrowing in the way the piece is supposed to be harrowing and so rarely is.

Dies Irae, written for the opening of the monument at Auschwitz, gathers vocal soloists — Zachos Terzakis, Anton Scharinger, Stephen Roberts among them — into a soundscape of sirens, whispers, spoken text, and full-throated choral terror. Gielen paces its accumulating dread with an almost cinematic sense of inevitability. The final pages, chorus and orchestra grinding toward a dissonant unison, land with the force of an accusation. I don’t think I’ve heard a more frightening account of this score, not even Penderecki’s own recordings, which tend toward a slightly cooler objectivity.

So: a record of two minds, or rather one mind serving two masters unequally. If you already own a Stabat Mater you love, and there are several, you need not replace it with this one. But the Penderecki alone justifies the purchase, and justifies, too, a reconsideration of a composer I have too often filed under important rather than moving. Here, for once, he is both.