ANDRZEJ DZIADEK (b.1957): Symphony No. 1 (National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra Katowice; Antoni Wit), Cello Concerto (Adam Krzeszowiec [cello], National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra Katowice; Michał Klauza), Magnificat (Elżbieta Drążek-Barcik [soprano], Agnieszka Wietrzny-Monasterska [alto], Choir and Symphony Orchestra of Polish Radio and Television Kraków; Jerzy Kosek).

Description: If you enjoyed last month’s offering from this outstanding neo-romantic composer (09X052), it pretty much goes without saying that you'll want this equally impressive disc too. The 3-movement First Symphony (1996-97) is an intense and powerful work, weighty, serious, and tautly argued. The first movement begins eruptively, with a warlike theme crowned with blaring fanfares. A tranquil, lyrical second theme is presented, and a development section pits the two against one another in a tersely compressed derivative of sonata form, but the bellicose first subject clearly triumphs, increasingly resembling the terrifying final climax of Bruckner 8th's first movement, horns baying into the abyss, to conclude the movement. The central Adagio begins in a deceptively pastoral mood, with plaintive oboe and bassoon solos over increasingly ominous string chords, but soon the vistas broaden, and a succession of climaxes like Brucknerian mountain peaks, increasingly imposing and storm-wrapped, make up the bulk of the movement. The finale is tense and driven, a hurtling juggernaut disconcertingly interrupted by moments of uneasy calm before finally settling on a kind of hectic, obsessive totentanz, abruptly extinguished. The setting of the Magnificat was the composer’s diploma work, from 1986, and it initiated the corpus of sacred music that forms a significant part of Dziadek's output. The work is monumental in expression and the forces required, and represents an enormously impressive début for the young composer. The very tonal work is a blend of Romanticism and 20th-century post-romanticism, with its roots in the Baroque. After a powerful introduction, the second and third lines of the text are treated (mostly) as reverent arias with jubilant interludes, and the fourth is a hushed, awed reflection for choir, but as the text becomes an exaltation of God’s awesome power rather than a gentle Marian hymn, the following section (as long as three other movements together) is effectively presented as a self-contained cantata, with the bass thundering like an Old Testament prophet, and the music takes on a monumental aspect, with episodes of propulsive pounding and surging Sibelian chorales from the orchestra. A deep, resonant "slow movement", the emotional heart of the work, concludes this section, before the traditional Gloria Patri mirrors the opening Magnificat, with mighty fanfares and blaring organ chords. The Cello Concerto is from 2014, and apparently represents the direction the composer’s more recent music has taken. Structurally highly unusual, it places almost its entire musical argument in the hands of the soloist; the first 1/3 of the work is an intense, impassioned unaccompanied soliloquy for the cello, tragic in mood. When the orchestra finally enters, its function is to describe looming, shadowy landscapes as a setting for the resumption of the cello's melancholy ruminations. An even more extreme example of the processes at work in the Violin Concerto on last month’s disc, the piece contains virtually no fast music, such as there is being gestural and confined to the solo part, aside from a brief agitated climax in the final section. And yet, so eloquent and compelling is the legend spun in the lowering gloom by the work’s bardic narrator that somehow it works, and entirely avoids monotony. The tragic denouement of the tale, accompanied by a funereal ostinato, and the desolate coda, are as moving as they are profoundly disquieting.