Kilar: Bogurodzica / Piano Concerto / Hoary Fog / Koscielec 1909

Description

Wojciech Kilar (b.1932) Vocal and Orchestral Music   Wojciech Kilar was born in the then Polish city of Lwow (now L'viv in Ukraine) on 17 July 1932. He studied piano and composition at the Katowice Academy from 1950 to 1955, then the State Higher Music School in Krakow until 1958. In 1957 he had attended the Darmstadt Summer School in (West) Germany, then a centre for the emerging European musical avant-garde, and during 1959-60 was a pupil of Nadia Boulanger in Paris. In 1960 his Oda Bela Bartok in memoriam received the Lili Boulanger Foundation Award, with numerous national and international prizes to follow in its wake. After a period of experimentation in the 1960s, Kilar arrived at an idiom notable for its directness of expression and immediacy of impact: an approach typified by the 1974 orchestral piece Krzesany [Naxos 8.554788]. Polish traditional sources, both sacred and secular, are often prominent, through an idiom that, in the words of the writer Adrian Thomas, has "... been variously regarded as spuriously kitsch, naively devotional or intuitively post-modern". It may be just these qualities - or the perception of them - that led to Kilar's success as a film composer, with over a hundred scores for Polish films before that for Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula won him the ASCAP Award in 1992, to be followed by a similarly acclaimed score for Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden in 1994 [a selection from both features on Marco Polo 8.225153] and also Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady in 1996. Moreover, the vividly expressive themes and quasi-minimalist harmony characterizing these film scores are qualities equally evident in Kilar's concert output: not least the four pieces contained on the present disc. Bogurodzica (1975) is a fantasy for chorus and orchestra on the ancient Polish hymn sung in time of war and of peace (and best known in the West through its use in Sinfonia Sacra by Andrzej Panufnik). Distant taps on side-drum gradually move closer then recede, the second crescendo underpinned by a timpani roll. Halting peremptorily, the chorus fervently intones the opening lines of the text, solemnly underpinned by strings and percussion. Forceful reiteration and dissonant outbursts only add to the intensity of the setting, which unfolds as a series of repeated phrases in rhythmic unison, col legno strings and percussion to the fore. At length a suspended passage for strings and harp introduces a calm, even remote atmosphere, with the chorus intoning the final lines of the text in suitably hieratic fashion. This resolves first onto a fifth, then onto a perfect cadence, and the piece appears to be heading for a blissful conclusion, but a defiant final gesture, and the sound of side-drum once more receding into silence, leaves one in no doubt as to the music's underlying emotional fervour and ominous import. The Piano Concerto (1997) is among the most recent of Kilar's concert works and draws on sources as distinct