Andrzej Panufnik: Sinfonia Elegiaca (Symphony No. 2) (1957, rev. 1966), Nocturne (1947, rev. 1955), Rhapsody (1956). The Louisville Orchestra, Robert Whitney. First Edition Music FECD-0017 (2003) barcode 809157000174
Sinfonia recorded 1961, Nocturne recorded 9.V.65, Rhapsody recorded 22.XI.66, all Macauley Theater, Louisville
Nocturne reissued on “Polski Nowoczesny” (Polish Modern), First Edition Music FECD-1909 (2006)
Not particularly innovative or original and often downright facile, but, at its best, subtle and atmospheric
Originally posted on Amazon.com, 12 November 2007
I count Andrzej Panufnik among the “mildly modern” composers from the second half of the 20th Century. He did not belong to the avant-garde, but not either to the most backward-looking neo-Romantics. I’m not sure his music has an unmistakable personality that makes it uniquely his own, but I’ve always found it quite pleasant to hear. His 8th Symphony (Sinfonia Votiva) which can be found in a superb 1989 Hyperion recording by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Ozawa (paired with Roger Sessions’ Concerto for Orchestra, Hyperion CDA66050, reissued in 2002 on Hyperion Helios CDH55100, link will open new tab to my review) is a haunting work, in the austere sparseness and delicacy of its instrumentation and stylistic independence of its language.
That said, I’m afraid I can’t muster much enthusiasm for the 1957 Sinfonia Elegiaca (2nd Symphony). To my ears, its two outer slow movements try just a little too hard to sound movingly elegiac and don’t avoid being mawkish, and frame an embarrassingly bombastic Shostakovich-like sequence of battle music. The music is no more advanced stylistically than Shostakovitch or Honegger. But those who don’t mind listening to second-tier Shostakovich should enjoy it, and it is easy-listening. Note that this 1961 recording (in good mono, although some important secondary material on strings is lost in the second movement), despite First Edition Music’s mention of the revision, documents the original, pre-1966 revision of the Symphony. The differences don’t change the substance of the work, but they are significant.
The same recording of the 1947 Nocturne was reissued two years later by First Edition Music in its Louisville Modern Polish collection, FECD-1909 (link to my review), and it is an enjoyable piece. As I wrote in my review, it is in arch form, beginning in an eerie and mysterious atmosphere of softly whispering percussions and slowly moving through gently rocking melodies of almost neo-romantic tinge at times, until it reaches a steep climactic peak around the 7-to-10-minute mark, then receding back in palindrome form to the reverse of its beginning. It is orchestrated with much refinement. If on a blind test I had been told it was music of, say, William Schuman, I wouldn’t have balked.
Although still very traditional in its compositional style, the Rhapsody from 1956 is a little more original and subtle than the Symphony; not so much in its middle section though, again an orchestral showpiece trying a little too hard, I find, to sound like a romping Polish country dance (but it ends with a striking upward timpani scale). But its first section is a kind of non-virtuosic Concerto for orchestra starting with very sparse, meditative and highly fascinating melodic lines attributed to successive solo instruments, and ending with hauntingly beautiful bird trills played by the violins in their upper registers. The third section (they follow without break, although they are individually cued) is an intensely lyrical chant sounding like a funeral farewell, not very subtle but effective (again echoes of Shostakovich), progressively scaling down as the instruments drop out and the dynamics subside, ending in a gloomy atmosphere with double-bass solo.
The recordings are respectively from 1961, 1965 and 1966 and they sound fine, other than the fact that in 1961 Louisville was appallingly still recording in mono, so the Sinfonia comes with more tape hiss than the two others and a somewhat distant sound. It originally came out of Louisville’s label First Edition Records, LOU 624, paired with Chilean Juan Orrego-Salas’ Symphony No. 2 op. 39, not reissued to CD but available on download or streaming. Nocturne was on LS 654 with Nikolai Lopatnikoff’s Variazioni Concertanti op. 38 (not reissued to CD but available on download/streaming), and Rhapsody was published on LS 671 with Boris Blacher’s Orchestral Fantasy, this one reissued to CD on an all-Blacher First Edition Music companion CD, FECD-0040 (link to my review). For everything about the Louisville CD reissues, see my Louisville CD-discography.
Excellent notes, written specifically for this reissue. At 51:40, the disc is just above my personal mark of what is acceptable for a CD (but that was all the Panufnik Louisville had in their catalog).