Baculewski, was born in Warsaw in 1950. He studied composition
with Witold Rudsinski at the State College of Music and subsequently
with Messiaen in Paris. He is now a composition professor at
his alma mater in Warsaw, which has since been renamed the Fryderyk
Chopin University of Music. An essayist, writer and reviewer
he has also found the time to reconstruct Ignacy Dobrzynski’s
1824 Piano Concerto as well as other nineteenth century Polish
works, not least Moniuszko’s opera Beata which he orchestrated.
His music is arresting, but predicated on established historic
practices such as the Ground that gives its name to the title
of his 1981 work. This does indeed open powerfully, though from
2:47 a harpsichord appears playing in a baroque style, apparently
indifferent to the sense of glower and glitter around. Ostinati
and variational form are the spine of the work, though so artfully
constructed that one might not easily know. The outbursts have
a Penderecki-like authority. A Walking Shadow (1990)
derives from Macbeth; ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a
poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And
then is here no more…’ The composer apparently denies any programmatic
implications. Again he uses the harpsichord as a responsive
active agent in his sound world. The percussion section too
is intimately involved, its contribution ominous. Colours throughout
are heavy, dark, brooding. It’s not an especially easy listen
– but then it’s not supposed to be.
I’ve recently been listening to the fine Polish alto Jadwiga
Rappé singing a sheaf of Moniuszko songs. Here she is again.
She sings Les Adieux, written for her, settings of five
French poems - by Lamartine, Verlaine, Leconte de Lisle, and
two by Apollinaire. The texts are here, but translated into
Polish. The first four settings date from 2001, and the final
one from 2008. The quick ‘broken phrases’ and slithering writing
of the first setting is highly expressive. Baculewski infiltrates
a Mahlerian figure into the third, though one might not notice
(I certainly didn’t) and in Apollinaire’s L’adieu infuses,
toward the very end, the spirit of Purcell’s Dido; quite an
apposite move, and indicative of that communing spirit that
sees him employing other composers’ music allusively within
his own. The most rhythmically charged writing falls in the
last song, where the alto is at her most formidable; she’s a
fine musician indeed.
The longest work in this disc is the Bartók-sounding Concerto
for Orchestra. The piccolo opens in birdsong, a recurrent feature,
and there is plenty of colour and aeration, plenty of shifting
textures and colours. The more visceral writing does again put
one in mind of Penderecki, the avian ones of his erstwhile teacher
Messiaen. The martial figures are unsettling, the percussion
again staunch.
The composer is on record as advocating in his own music ‘a
return to melody, sonorous beauty, consonances, phrasing and
form’ [Baculewski, Output of Polish Composers, 1984].
This doesn’t however preclude moments of terse and sometimes
unlikeable eruption. He is certainly a composer who values kinship
and the primacy of tradition. Sensitive to form, rejecting obscurity,
his works are impressively controlled, and powerfully conveyed,
in this fine disc.
Jonathan Woolf
Jadwiga Rappé (alto, Les Adieux)
