Wind & Percussion Music by Penderecki, Mayuzumi & Badings

Only one other recording of these works grouped together appears to exist. Performed by the New Brass Symphony, it too is out of print. Even individually these works are tough to find. All three are extremely challenging to perform, and certainly challenging to listen to as well. They display the chaotic complexity of 20th century avant-garde classical style, making them less accessible to general listeners. All three have sections I find particularly nice, but the Mayuzumi is the most accessible work of the three.

Liner Notes:

American Wind Symphony Orchestra
Robert Austin Boudreau, Music Director

A short walk from teeming, downtown Pittsburgh two rivers—the Allegheny and the Monongahela—mingle their waters to form a third, the mighty Ohio, and start it down its 963-mile journey, southwest to the Mississippi. At the point where the rivers meet (to form what looks like the letter Y lying on its side) there is a lovely uncluttered park that attracts many strollers during the warm months. Some come merely to picnic or loaf and watch the boats go by, but many more head for a big red barge anchored on the north (Allegheny) side of the park, the home of a remarkable cultural phenomenon known as the American Wind Symphony Orchestra.

Founded in 1957 by Robert Austin Boudreau, this group of TK musicians, chosen from the top young talent from the United States and abroad, has in its 13-year existence caused a major upheaval in musical circles, not only in Pittsburgh but wherever it has been heard. While most large cities offer some kind of outdoor music in the summer, most of it is of the light-classic or familiar-masterpiece category. Not so, the orchestra in Pittsburgh. It throws in a few toe-tappers for encores now and then ("Down by the Riverside" is the inevitable, if only semi-official, theme), but its major business is the expansion of the musical repertory by commissioning hard, new compositions from some of the most adventurous composers in the avant-garde firmament. What you will hear on this record, is an example of what the American Wind Symphony Orchestra offers its audiences—wildly enthusiastic, please note—on any given night during its eight-week season.

Credit for this unique idea—which can be defined as a refusal to believe that people have to stop thinking once the warm weather begins—must fall to Boudreau, a New Englander trained at Juilliard and the Paris Conservatory, a man fiercely dedicated to preserving culture as a living, growing part of human experience, and awesomely endowed with the twin virtues needed to make one's way in his chosen field these days: the ability to make music superbly and the ability to charm enough money out of private and official sources to keep the enterprise afloat. Credit must also go in large measure to Point Park College in Pittsburgh and its president, Arthur M. Blum, a dynamic educational force in Pittsburgh which maintains the orchestra as part of its growing cultural service to its community.

Pittsburgh is, however, only one of many cities which benefits from the remarkable work of the American Wind Symphony. After the home season each summer, the barge sets out down the Ohio River, serenading communities in six states with the same challenging fare it performs at home. The orchestra's journeys in its time have taken it up and down the Mississippi, through the Tennessee Valley, and the Inland Waterways. Wherever it has sailed on its floating stage, it has spread the excitement of the living, growing musical repertory.

The three compositions presented herewith are splendid examples of the powerful, original music the American Wind Symphony has caused to exist through its commissioning and publishing activities. Each of the three composers—the Dutchman Henk Badings (1907- ), Poland's Krzysztof Penderecki (1933- ) and Japan's Toshiro Mayuzumi (1929- ) is among the most talented and respected free spirits among today's composers. Each of them has approached the problem of writing for a specialized ensemble of winds, brass and percussion with no condescension to the youth of the orchestra's members or the supposed tastes of audiences at outdoor summer concerts. They have, instead, written big, daring, vivid (and extraordinarily difficult) music.

Badings, one of the first major composers to experiment with the fascinating and seemingly limitless possibilities of music produced by electronic means, has created in his Armageddon a harrowing tone-picture of the Last Judgment. His score is in seven sections, of which the first and third are for tape alone. The fifth uses a soprano, who intones a wordless line. The last is a huge climactic section in which tape, orchestra and soprano (this time singing part of the text from the "Dies Irae" section of the traditional Requiem Mass) join forces. "The end of the world," Badings writes of his score, "is not the most attractive theme to linger with in our thoughts. I reread the Bible, I looked again at the woodcuts on the subject by the famous medieval Albrecht Dürer and at the impressive lithographs by Odilon Redon. From them the subject haunted me and I started my sound-fantasies." Badings has included in his score such unusual instruments as a bass flute, a bass oboe or heckelphone and two contrabass-clarinets. His tape was composed with sounds produced by a variety of oscillators, tone generators and ring modulators, transformed by means of an array of sophisticated techniques involving splicing and rerecording to produce the two-track tape heard here.

—Carole Farley, Soprano Soloist

Penderecki's Pittsburgh Overture uses nothing but "live" sounds, but uses them in an even more staggering array. No fewer than 18 types of percussion are required (five woodblocks of varying sizes, six cymbals, six timpani, etc.) along with a full complement of winds and brass. Yet, in no bar of the 104 the work takes are all instruments heard together. Instead, there is a constant vibration, a moving back and forth from one block of sound to the next. Penderecki's style is like that of no other composer active today. Wisps of sound, blurs of sonority sliding up and down the tonal spectrum, blat out at each other, often separated by long, mysterious silences. It sounds at first fragmented, formless; yet, further hearings reveal a subtle but clear over-all structure, a logic involving statement, departure and return that gives the music both shape and substance. Is there a more difficut piece of music in existence? Or an ensemble better equipped to cope with its intricacies? Very likely, not.

 

Mayuzumi, widely known to American audiences through his superb score for John Huston's film, The Bible, is one of the small but remarkable group of Japanese musical iconoclasts that has developed in recent years and brought that distant land into the musical mainstream. His Percussion Concerto, a one-movement work demanding yeoman work from two timpani players and four other percussionists, again along with a large wind and brass ensemble,- is in a single movement that, like the Penderecki Overture, returns to a restatement of its opening material at the end. Like several other avant-garde composers of the day, Mayuzumi has created his music with an ingenious consideration for the actual space that surrounds a performance. The two timpanists, for example, often echo each other's work from opposite sides of the stage, creating a spatial effect exciting in actual performance and also on a stereophonic recording. Vivid, slashing in its rhythms, colorful in its myriad sound combinations, the Concerto stands as almost an encyclopedia of modern percussive effects . . . but an encyclopedia that exists as a living work of art.

—Alan Rich, Music Critic, New York Magazine

Track List:

1. Krzysztof Penderecki: Pittsburgh Overture
2. Toshiro Mayuzumi: Concerto for Percussion and Winds
3. Henk Badings: Armageddon

Download Link: Enjoy the Music!, or here.

Krzysztof Penderecki: A Portrait (1972)

Liner Notes:

Krzysztof Penderecki, Poland's foremost living composer, was born in Debica on November 23, 1933. Music was not particularly emphasized during his childhood and his parents had no intention of making him a musician: it is altogether possible that this very absence of early indoctrination was a factor in creating the exploratory inventiveness, utterly uninhibited by traditional concepts, that established Penderecki by the time he was thirty as unmistakably unique and unarguably one of the most significant creative forces in the music of his time.

When the seventeen-year-old Penderecki went to Cracow to complete his education, music was still more or less a hobby; his "serious" interests were art, literature and philosophy. His hobby was important enough to him, however, to lead him to teach himself to play the violin, and soon he was composing pieces for himself—some in the virtuoso style 1 Paganini, others in the style of Bach. He developed a particular interest in the pre-Bach masters of polyphony, tried his own hand at polyphonic writing, and finally acknowledged the seriousness of his involvement by taking private lessons in composition. Before he turned twenty-one he decided on a career as a composer and enrolled in the Superior School of Music in Cracow, from which he was graduated with distinction in 1958. The following year he rose to prominence virtually overnight when he entered three different works (anonymously) in the competition of the Youth Circle of the Association of Polish Composers and walked off with the three top prizes.

One of those prize-winning compositions was the Emanations for string orchestras recorded here. The other two were the Strophes for soprano, narrator and ten instruments and Psalms of David for mixed chorus and percussion. All three works displayed some of the characteristics the composer was to develop more extensively in his later music; like the later works, none of these could have been written by anyone else.

The Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, scored for fifty-two strings, probably Penderecki's most frequently performed work, was composed in 1960 as a memorial gesture on the fifteenth anniversary of the first use of the atomic bomb and was premiered in Warsaw on May 31 of the following year as part of the first-prize award in a competition sponsored by the Polish Radio. Later in 1961 it earned the composer another award, from UNESCO's International Rostrum of Composers. The St. Luke Passion, generally regarded as Penderecki's masterpiece, was begun two years later on commission from the West German Radio in Cologne to celebrate the seven-hundredth anniversary of the Münster Cathedral, in which it was first performed on March 30, 1966.

Among Penderecki's major works since the Passion are the Dies Irae, or Auschwitz Oratorio, composed and premiered early in 1967, the music drama The Devils of Loudun, after John Whiting's dramatization of the Aldous Huxley book, premiered in Hamburg in June 1969, Utrenja ("The Entombment of Christ") for soloists, choruses and percussion, first performed in the Altenberg Cathedral April 8, 1970, Kosmogonia for soloists, chorus and orchestra (using texts ranging from the ancient Greeks to Galileo to American and Soviet space flyers), commissioned by the United Nations and premiered at the UN October 24, 1970, and the Easter oratorio The Resurrection of Christ, given at the Altenberg Cathedral on May 28, 1971.

While he has written some music for electronic instruments, Penderecki has in the main relied on unconventional use of conventional instruments (including the human voice) to achieve his unusual and striking effects. He has shown a marked fascination with the extreme tonal ranges of voices and instruments, and there are aleatoric sections in several of his works. Shouting, hooting, hissing, bowing on the rim of a cymbal and other unorthodox devices are by now familiar parts of Penderecki's musical vocabulary, generally used to underscore the intensity of feeling in works "about" something—and all of his music, in one way or another, whether vocal or instrumental, sacred or secular, seems to deal passionately with the human condition.

Much of his music deals directly with some of the most poignant and horrendous actual events in the story of man —Hiroshima, Auschwitz, the outrage of Inquisition and autoda-fe—while such a work as Kosmogonia celebrates man's loftier aspirations. Penderecki maintains that neither religious nor political feelings have been important considerations in his work, citing broader moral and philosophical concepts. "I am a Catholic, but membership in a given church is not really the point," he said a few years ago. "It's rather that I am very much concerned with these topics . . . in an essentially moral and social way, not in either a political or a sectarian religious way." His success in communicating that concern is reflected in Bernard Jacobson's observation that "Penderecki uses his chosen methods to produce drama of an intensity and a human impact unmatched by any other composer alive."

During the last few years Penderecki has become a regular visitor to the United States, where his works have been performed by virtually every major orchestra. The Devils of Loudun was given brilliantly at Santa Fe in 1970 and several of his recent works have been premiered in this country. In the fall of 1972 he began teaching at the Yale University School of Music. Shortly before his arrival at Yale, he made his conducting debut in Europe, beginning a new and obviously important phase of his career.

The six works on this record constitute examples of Penderecki's writing in various forms, spanning the period 1958-1965. All six are markedly unorthodox in both structure and content, but just as markedly typical of their composer. The earliest is Emanations, for two string orchestras, already mentioned here as one of the three compositions with which Penderecki won the top prizes in the young composers' competition of 1959. The two string groups (the instruments in the second of which are tuned a minor second higher) are pitted against each other in a strenuous contest involving such techniques as high-speed non-rhythmic tremolo, hammer effect without use of the bow, and slides to produce tone fluctuation of a third of a tone. The work was composed in 1958 and dedicated to Tadeusz Ochlewski, perhaps the most productive musical activist in Poland in recent times and the founder of the Polskie Wydawnicto Muzyczne (Polish Musical Publication) in Cracow, the country's most significant institution for the publication of music and its literature.

The Three Miniatures for violin and piano, produced in 1959, are based on verses from the cycle Of the Genealogy of Instruments, by the Polish poet Jerzy Harasymowicz. The first section, Okaryna, celebrated the homely "sweet potato." The second, Basetla, depicts the small string bass popular in dance bands. The final section, Skrzypce, is about the violin itself. Although the entire sequence is performed in less than five minutes, it parades an astonishing assortment of effects: There is exaggerated vibrato—both excessively wide and tightly controlled—and a similar range of extremes in slow and fast trills; there is some playing behind the bridge, and the pianist is called upon, in the last five bars, to pluck the wires of his own instrument. The most unusual effect is called for in the second section, in which the pianist depresses the sustaining pedal (without striking a key) while the violinist leans into the open piano to play loud, percussive notes—exciting vibrations from the piano wires on a principle similar to that of the Aeolian harp or the "sympathetic" strings of the viola d'amore.

The String Quartet No. 1, composed in 1960 and first performed by the La Salle Quartet in Cincinnati on May 11, 1962, is a tightknit but serene work in a single brief movement. The score, unconventional in its notation, bears the note: "The tempo is determined by the duration of individual one-second sections. Deviations from this tempo within the limits from 0.8" to 1.4" for each section are admissible, depending on the first violinist's choice." Special symbols indicate instructions to play on the tailpiece of the instrument, to play between the bridge and tailpiece, to strike the sounding-board with the bow-handle or fingertips, to reach for the instrument's highest note (indefinite pitch), strike the strings with the open palm or fingers, and to produce various other effects.

The Stabat Mater for three sixteen-part choruses a cappella was originally composed in 1961, but has enjoyed a double life for the last several years, for Penderecki incorporated it into his St. Luke Passion (near the end of Part II) and, while it fits seamlessly into the larger work, it continues to be performed independently as well. Penderecki did not set the entire text of the familiar thirteenth-century poem, but selected from it the lines which might be said to depict the bereavement of the Mother in the most personal and poignant terms. Words are broken into syllables which are distributed in turn to each of the three choruses, and there is something like majesty in the way silences are used to project the starkness of the scene.

Reversing the procedure just described, the Miserere was composed originally as part of the St. Luke Passion (near the end of Part I in the sequence) and published on its own some time later (1967). It is scored for boys' choir and three adult choruses a cappella.

The Sonata for Cello and Orchestra, a serial work in two movements, was composed in 1964 and dedicated to Siegfried Palm, the young German cellist who has identified himself particularly with avant-garde music. It is a display-piece in a new context, to be approached only by the most secure and most avant of pyrotechnists—an exhaustive exposition of imaginative challenges for the soloist and, indeed, for the instrument itself.

Notes by Richard Freed

Credits & Track List:

1. "Emanationen," for 2 String Orchestras — 7:50 Min.

Orchestra of Radio Luxembourg Alois Springer, Conductor

Miniatures for Violin and Piano (1959) — 4:52

2. I
3. II
4. III

Min. Gabriel Banat, Violinist Ilana Vered, Pianist

5. String Quartet (1960) — 6:59 Min.

The Kohon String Quartet
(Harold Kohon, 1st Violin; Isidora Kohon, 2nd Violin; Eugenie Dengel, Viola; W. Ted Hoyle, Cello)

6. Stabat Mater — 7:49 Min.

Schola Cantorum Stuttgart Clytus Gottwald, Director

Sonata for Cello and Orchestra — 10:35 Min.

7. I
8. II

Thomas Blees, Cellist
Orchestra of Radio Luxembourg Alois Springer, Conductor

9. Miserere — 3:33 Min.

Schola Cantorum Stuttgart Clytus Gottwald, Director

Download Links: Enjoy the Music!, or Here.

Other Recordings of Music by Penderecki:

• Penderecki: Orchestral Works
• Penderecki: Orchestral Works
• Threnody to the Victims of Horoshima etc
• Penderecki, K.: St. Luke Passion (Klosinska, Kruszewski, Tesarowicz, Kolberger, Warsaw National Philharmonic, Wit)
• Penderecki, K.: Utrenja (Warsaw Philharmonic, Wit)
• Penderecki: Symphony No. 3 / Threnody
• Penderecki: Symphony No. 8 / Dies Irae / Aus Den Psalmen Davids
• Penderecki, K.: Polish Requiem (A) (Klosinska, Rappe, Minkiewicz, Nowacki, Warsaw National Philharmonic, Wit)
• Penderecki: Seven Gates Of Jerusalem, 'Symphony No. 7'
• Penderecki: Polish Requiem (A) / Przebudzenie Jakuba (The Awakening Of Jacob)
• Penderecki: Symphony No.2, Te Deum & Magnificat
• Penderecki, K.: Symphony No. 7
• Penderecki, K.: Credo
• Penderecki : Symphony No.2/Te Deum/Magnificat etc
• Polish String Quartets: Penderecki, Lason, Bacewicz
• Penderecki, K.: Concerto Grosso No. 1 For 3 Cellos / Largo / Sonata For Cello And Orchestra (Monighetti, Noras, Kwiatkowski, Wit)
• Penderecki: Violin Concertos Nos. 1 And 2
• Penderecki: Te Deum / Hymne An Den Heiligen Daniel / Polymorphia / Ciaconna