MUSIC REVIEW : A Memorable Polish Program

Even for a contemporary-music event, this was not a high-profile affair. Held in the old United University Church on the USC campus, the Monday night concert drew only a small crowd. Sirens wailed past outside as an iron-lipped trumpeter practiced nearby throughout the evening.

But for those who braved these elements to attend this concert by Andrzej Dutkiewicz and Marian Borkowski, both professors at the Chopin Academy in Warsaw, it was a dramatic event indeed. Understatement doesn’t seem to be in either composer’s vocabulary.

The concert, part of an exchange which will send USC Prof. Daniel Lewis to Warsaw in January, featured solo and duo piano works with the composers as performers.

Most impressive of the solo works was Borkowski’s nine-minute “Fragmenti,” in which he uses amplified piano to make abrupt, incisive contrasts. Clusters of soft, slippery lines are interrupted with harshly accented rapid-note outbursts. An ostinato rumble crescendos ominously as a spacey upper-note theme competes with it, then dies away at the end. Borkowski himself performed the music with theatrical flair.

In his 12-minute “Music for Two,” Dutkiewicz makes use of canonic imitation between the performers. Scale fragments, a syncopated linear theme, a major chord, all whiz back and forth. Some Bartokian night music emerges, and later, a dreamy Bachian melody. That motion of the music, tennis ball-like, and its single-mindedness at any given moment keep the argument sharply focused.

Borkowski’s “Dialoghi” is a conversation between pounding pianos, with rapid slapping, forearm chords and repeated notes exploding right and left--impressive sounds despite the primitive means. The composers played both duo-works with abandon.

Also included was Dutkiewicz’s Six Meditations for tape and piano: lots of noodling inside the piano with mallets, and various chirpings, twangings and spaceship landings providing sonic backdrop.