Penderecki: Piano Concerto Resurrection – Barry Douglas

Krzysztof Penderecki spent his last three decades trying to talk his way out of a reputation he himself had built, brick by dissonant brick, back when Kraków was gray and the avant-garde still felt like a moral position. Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima made him famous. Tone clusters, extended techniques, the whole arsenal of postwar shock — that was the young Penderecki, and he never quite escaped him, even as he spent his later career trying to become someone else entirely: a late-Romantic symphonist born a century too late, scribbling chorales and marches as if Shostakovich and Bruckner had never really gone out of style.

The Piano Concerto on this new Naxos release, subtitled Resurrection, is Exhibit A for the prosecution.

Written originally in 2001–02 and revised in 2007, it wears its occasion on its sleeve — Penderecki has said the September 11 attacks moved him to fold in a chorale of his own devising, plainchant-adjacent, solemn, the kind of tune that wants a cathedral and a great deal of incense. The trouble is that solemnity, deployed this liberally, starts to curdle into kitsch. Ten continuous tracks, thirty-seven minutes, and virtually no sense of formal argument — themes arrive, get pounded on, retreat, come back louder. The opening gesture, strings and percussion snapping like a whip before the piano even enters, promises something lean and dangerous, very much the Penderecki of the Second Violin Concerto. But that promise dissolves fast. By the time the chorale returns for the third or fourth time — strings hushed, piano tinkling in thirds above them — I found myself thinking not of Golgotha but of Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 4, of all things, that same coy blend of piety and salon glitter. There are Rachmaninoff surges that go nowhere, Prokofiev marches missing their teeth, and a peroration in the major, all slashing chords, that sounds suspiciously like a composer trying to give the people what he assumes they want. It isn’t ugly. It’s worse: it’s generic.

Barry Douglas plays it as if he believes every note, which is either heroic or a little sad, I can’t decide. His tone has plenty of steel when the writing calls for percussion-as-piano — Penderecki loves to treat the instrument like a tuned drum — and he shapes the quieter chorale paragraphs with real tenderness. Antoni Wit, who has been Penderecki’s most patient advocate on disc for going on twenty years now, keeps the Warsaw Philharmonic tight and alert even when the material sprawls. But no maestro can fix a piece that doesn’t know when to end. Compare it to the composer’s own violin concertos — similarly long-breathed, similarly reliant on a single recurring idea — and you feel the difference between a work that earns its duration and one that simply accumulates minutes.

Then the Flute Concerto begins, and everything changes.

Written a decade earlier, in 1992, for chamber orchestra, it is modest where the Piano Concerto is grandiose, and modesty suits Penderecki better than he usually gets credit for. Łukasz Długosz — young, Polish, clearly steeped in this idiom from the cradle — plays with a silvery, almost vocal line, full of the sighing appoggiaturas and folk-tinged turns that Penderecki borrows, lightly, from his own Polish highland heritage. The orchestration is transparent enough that you actually hear the wind principals and the harp and the occasional col legno tap from the strings as incident, not wallpaper. Cadenzas abound, and Długosz handles them with a kind of unforced virtuosity — no grandstanding, just breath and shape. Twenty-three minutes, and not one of them overstays.

It’s an old paradox with this composer: give him a big canvas and a Message, and he reaches for the nearest available cliché; give him a smaller room to work in, and the imagination that produced Threnody and the St. Luke Passion comes flickering back to life. I don’t think that’s an accident. Penderecki’s late style, for all the talk of “resurrection” and reconciliation with tradition, works best when the ambitions are held on a short leash.

Sound engineering is typical Naxos-in-Warsaw: close, dry-ish, favoring clarity over bloom, which flatters the flute concerto and does the piano concerto no particular favors — climaxes turn merely loud rather than overwhelming. Wit’s advocacy throughout this ongoing Penderecki cycle remains indispensable groundwork for anyone tracing the composer’s long, strange migration from enfant terrible to reluctant elder statesman. Buy the disc for Długosz and the flute concerto, by all means. The piano concerto you can sample once, shake your head, and move on.