Tour of a Nation’s Musical Past, Present
Every so often, the Polish Music Center at USC reminds us--with festivals, conferences and concerts--that Polish music did not begin and most certainly did not end with Chopin. This year, it has come up with a new way of bringing music-making Poles to the wider attention, by instigating an annual Paderewski Lecture. USC’s connection with the legendary Polish pianist, composer and statesman is that the university gave an honorary degree to Ignacy Jan Paderewski in 1923, and the center holds some of his papers.
The first “lecture” Friday night in Newman Hall featured the Polish composer and pianist Zygmunt Krauze. Though more concert than discourse, Krauze did touch on matters Polish, such as explaining the historical traditions of folk music and dance. He had the use of a local troupe, Polish Folk Dance Ensemble Krakusy, which demonstrated the steps of the polonaise and mazurka. And Krauze connected his own modern style to Chopin by playing a mazurka and polonaise augmented with his improvisations. But interesting as this was, the real value of Krauze’s appearance was simply to provide an arresting composer, a major figure in Europe though inexplicably little known in America, with a rare local forum.
Krauze, who is 63, is a fascinating figure in Polish music. His roots are to Witold Lutoslawski, the most important composer in the flourishing of Polish music after World War II, which led to a public avant-garde scene in the ‘60s and early ‘70s that was unique among Soviet Bloc nations. Lutoslawski began by writing in an advanced national style, as a kind of Polish Bartok, but once he discovered the chance composition of John Cage, he became somewhat more radical if always elegant in sonic exploration. Krauze, as a member of the more rebellious next generation, followed in Lutoslawski’s footsteps closely at first but kept going.
Krauze’s lecture-recital was broad. The first half looked at history and the influence of folk music and dance in piano works by Chopin, Karol Szymanowski, Lutoslawski and an example of Krauze’s student pieces from 1958, “Five Folk Melodies,” which he said he had forgotten about and just recently discovered on faded yellow manuscript paper long buried in an old bureau. After intermission, Krauze offered examples of that exciting new music scene in Warsaw that quickly moved him from the folk style.
Unfortunately, the scope of this recital was too broad--after all, Boguslaw Schaeffer’s “Non Stop,” alone, lasted eight hours when Krauze premiered it in 1964. Yet in a mere three-minute excerpt, Krauze was able to attack the piano ferociously and with seductive gentleness, to bang on it as a percussion instrument, to play on the strings inside, to whistle and stomp the floor and throw in some drunken Chopin and Mozart.
One way Krauze connects the past with the present is through the improvisations he likes to tack on to his Chopin performances. These include getting stuck on a small figure and repeating it over and over to mesmerizing effect. He did that to the Mazurka in A minor, Opus 67, No. 4, and the Polonaise in E-flat minor, Opus 26, No. 2. But even when Krauze plays Chopin or other earlier music straight, he has an improvisatory style in which exaggerated rubato and a heavy foot on the pedal create lingering harmonic resonances and blurred chords. A performance of Paderweski’s Nocturne in B-flat major, Opus 16, No. 4, in fact, was nearly as weird and woozy as Krauze’s own “Nightmare Tango.”
Krauze’s most interesting example of his own obsessive interest in gripping sonority was “Stone Music,” in which he placed stones on the strings of the piano, and then struck the strings with metal bars. With microphones amplifying the small sounds, the result was a gorgeously enveloping ringing.
But this was nothing more than a taste of a composer of a wide range of works (he has just had a new opera performed in Warsaw to great acclaim and has a children’s opera on the way, as well as a work for the Bavarian Radio Orchestra). His appearance last spring at the UCSB New Music Festival was a revelation--his chamber music creates a startling, intense, original, immediately communicative sound world that seems riveted to the earth and the emotions, music both fresh and timeless. This is an important voice and I hope the Paderewski Lecture will just be the beginning of the Polish Music Center’s efforts to get it heard here.
