Kilar: Angelus / Exodus / Krzesany

Description

Wojciech Kilar (b. 1932)Choral and Orchestral WorksWojciech Kilar was born in the then Polish city of Lwów, now L’viv in Ukraine on 17th July, 1932. He studied piano and composition at the Katowice Academy from 1950 to 1955, then at the State Higher Music School in Kraków until 1958. In 1957 he attended the Darmstadt Summer School, and during 1959-60 was a pupil of Nadia Boulanger in Paris. In 1960 his Oda Béla Bartók in memoriam received the Lili Boulanger Foundation Award, the first of numerous prizes to come. A prolific film composer, notably for such major Polish directors as Krysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, in the 1990s Kilar has found success in the West for his scores to Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for which he won an ASCAP award in 1993, Roman Polánski’s Death and the Maiden, and Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady. After a period of experimentation in the 1960s, his concert work became notable for its directness of expression and immediacy of impact. Polish traditional sources, sacred and secular, are often prominent, in an idiom which, according to the writer Adrian Thomas, has "... been variously regarded as spuriously kitsch, naively devotional or intuitively post-modern". Krzesany (1974), inspired by the Polish mountains, was Kilar’s first major success outside Poland, thanks in part to a recording by Witold Rowicki which enjoyed wide circulation in the West. Strings open with a passionate unison statement in chromatic, supplicatory harmonies. Dynamics quieten, lower strings sound a passive response, and a dance-like motion in the basses works its way towards a repeat of the opening bars, now on brass and strings. Three rapid downward glissandi across the orchestra lead to a ruminative theme on solo strings, then a general pause before a sequence of hammered unison orchestral chords. The music now drives forward in motoric rhythmic unisons on strings, with brass and percussion emerging to further the momentum. Calmer music on strings provides necessary respite, before the staggered unison orchestral approach to the work’s peroration, a raucous folk-like mêlée for strings, reinforced by shrill wind and clanging percussion. Held chords in the brass gradually break through the texture, at which point the work comes to a sudden, heart-stopping conclusion. Angelus (1984) is a large-scale setting of the Ave Maria text. Muttered recitations, alternately for men’s and women’s voices, gradually increase in emotional and dynamic intensity. As the voices join in unison, a timpani roll leads to an outburst for chorus and orchestra around the words Jesus and Amen. A solo soprano enters in ecstatic strains, complemented by the chorus’ devotional restraint. Piano chords underpin a texture of Respighi-like richness, as the soprano continues her rapt meditation, the chorus echoing certain of her phrases as a brief climax,