Poland

Being the risky, aspiringly cutting edge things that they are, contemporary music festivals always tend to be a bit hit and miss. Very little i heard at Musica Nova 2025 fell into the latter category, but there were a few pieces that slipped through the quality net, being memorable for …

Two years ago i wrote that a composer i’d been “trying to get the measure of” was Grażyna Bacewicz. Since then, CPO have helped that process with a series of albums exploring her orchestral music, the latest of which, Complete Orchestral Works Vol. 3, has recently been released. It’s clear …

i wrote before about the way the World New Music Days acts like a hadron collider, smashing together diverse stylistic and aesthetic ideas from around the world. One of the startling truths to emerge from this violent eclecticism is that, what makes bad music bad, wherever it comes from in …

It was a little under a year ago that the CPO label brought out the first volume in their new series exploring the Complete Symphonic Works of Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz. As i pointed out in my review, they effectively jumped into her music halfway through, beginning in the early …

Sacrum Profanum is a festival that has taken place in Kraków, Poland, since 2003. As its name suggests, the original purpose of the festival was to juxtapose sacred and secular music, from the 18th and 19th centuries, but since 2008 it’s been focused on music from the 20th and 21st …

Perhaps the most compelling example of the kind of disorientation that border states can engender came in the concert given by Polish ensemble Spółdzielnia Muzyczna, appropriately titled ‘The Borders of Identity’. Here, more than anywhere else during AFEKT 2023, was a concert where none of the five works on the …

There have been a couple of interesting examples recently of conductors filling in the blanks of their respective symphony cycles. Antoni Wit recorded all but one of Krzysztof Penderecki‘s eight symphonies with the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, issued on a series of five discs by Naxos in the noughties. …

A composer i’ve been trying to get the measure of lately is Grażyna Bacewicz. Bacewicz died in 1969, but her output seems to be going through something of a rediscovery of late, with concert performances and new recordings now emerging with increasing regularity. It’s a generalisation, i know, but over …

i headed up the M5 to Birmingham last Sunday for a concert given by the CBSO Youth Orchestra at Symphony Hall. For many people in the audience, i suppose the highlight would have been two works by Berlioz: the concert opened with the Roman Carnival Overture and closed with the …

Twentieth century music is at an interesting point in its history from the perspective of recordings. Contemporary music, for obvious reasons, is always the most under-represented, whereas works from the last hundred years are beginning to reach the stage where’s there’s a more meaningful range of recordings available. In the …

One of my unexpected highlights of 2017 was the album Contemporary Jewish Music by Polish composer Stefan Węgłowski, a mesmerising sequence of electroacoustic responses to a variety of Jewish sources, utterly transforming them while retaining tangible links to their origins. His latest release, PHASE_1_4, makes that album sound like an …

The smallest-scale events at this year’s Estonian Music Days were a pair of chamber concerts at each end of the festival. Irina Zahharenkova’s keyboard recital at the Arvo Pärt Centre encompassed extremes of musical invention. The most egregious were two works dating from the early 1990s by a Russian guitarist …

How have i never heard the music of Aleksandra Gryka before? That’s the question i’ve kept wondering while exploring Interialcell, a new CD featuring five works of hers performed by Klangforum Wien. It’s left me disappointed at making what is, for me, such a very late discovery (her worklist goes …

Some composers you encounter all the time; others not so much. i’ve only come into contact with Marcin Stańczyk‘s music on one occasion: back in 2017, at the UK première of some drops… for double-bell trumpet and ensemble. Until, that is, just recently, when i began immersing myself in a …

It must have been a strange experience for anyone smitten by the music of Krzysztof Penderecki during the 1960s and early 1970s, falling in love with the bold, abrasive, raw abstract shapes and sound forms unleashed in works such as Emanations (1959), Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), St …