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Poland

  • FestivalsPremières

    Musica Nova 2025 (Part 3)

    by 5:4 March 13, 2025 • 12:32
    March 13, 2025 • 12:32

    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 …

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Grażyna Bacewicz – Complete Orchestral Works Vol. 3

    by 5:4 February 19, 2025 • 06:00
    February 19, 2025 • 06:00

    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 …

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  • Festivals

    World New Music Days 2024, Faroe Islands (Part 3)

    by 5:4 July 17, 2024 • 11:04
    July 17, 2024 • 11:04

    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 …

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  • 20th CenturyCD/Digital releases

    Grażyna Bacewicz – Complete Symphonic Works Vol. 2; Orchestral Works, Vol. 1

    by 5:4 June 14, 2024 • 11:54
    June 14, 2024 • 11:54

    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 …

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  • Festivals

    Sacrum Profanum 2023 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 November 16, 2023 • 11:18
    November 16, 2023 • 11:18

    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 …

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  • Festivals

    AFEKT 2023 (Part 3)

    by 5:4 November 14, 2023 • 06:00
    November 14, 2023 • 06:00

    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 …

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Krzysztof Penderecki – Symphony No. 6 “Chinese Songs”

    by 5:4 October 20, 2023 • 15:52
    October 20, 2023 • 15:52

    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. …

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Grażyna Bacewicz – Complete Symphonic Works Vol. 1; Piano Concertos

    by 5:4 July 5, 2023 • 11:59
    July 5, 2023 • 11:59

    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 …

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  • ConcertsPremières

    Symphony Hall, Birmingham: CBSO Youth Orchestra

    by 5:4 February 28, 2023 • 15:47
    February 28, 2023 • 15:47

    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 …

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  • 20th CenturyCD/Digital releases

    Michael Gielen conducts Messiaen, Szymanowski & Penderecki

    by 5:4 November 4, 2022 • 16:10
    November 4, 2022 • 16:10

    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 …

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Stefan Węgłowski – PHASE_1_4

    by 5:4 September 14, 2022 • 09:25
    September 14, 2022 • 09:25

    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 …

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Estonian Music Days 2022 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 May 2, 2022 • 05:00
    May 2, 2022 • 05:00

    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 …

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Aleksandra Gryka – Interialcell

    by 5:4 November 16, 2021 • 15:26
    November 16, 2021 • 15:26

    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 …

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Marcin Stańczyk – Mosaïque

    by 5:4 November 8, 2021 • 15:43
    November 8, 2021 • 15:43

    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 …

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  • 20th CenturyCD/Digital releases

    Krzysztof Penderecki – Complete Music for String Quartet & String Trio

    by 5:4 June 16, 2021 • 14:34
    June 16, 2021 • 14:34

    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 …

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  • Announcements

    Krzysztof Penderecki, 1933–2020

    by 5:4 March 29, 2020 • 16:45
    March 29, 2020 • 16:45

    i feel terribly sad to have just read the news on the Schott website that Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki has died today. Composers impact on our lives in unique and unpredictable ways, and for me, Penderecki’s music has been an omnipresence. When i was still at school, just at the …

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Zbigniew Karkowski – Encumbrance

    by 5:4 August 9, 2019 • 16:06
    August 9, 2019 • 16:06

    In recent years, one of the most vividly memorable Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festivals was 2017, when the work of Polish composer Zbigniew Karkowski was prominently featured. Huddersfield is in fact the only place in the UK that i’ve ever had the opportunity to experience Karkowski’s music performed live, which suggests …

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  • CD/Digital releasesFree musicThematic series

    Zbigniew Karkowski – Live in Lyon; UEXKULL

    by 5:4 January 24, 2019 • 06:00
    January 24, 2019 • 06:00

    One of my absolute favourites at the most extreme end of pretty much all musical continua is Polish composer Zbigniew Karkowski. Karkowski died just over five years ago, and digesting his legacy is something i’ve been attempting to do since his passing. While there are plenty of available recordings of his …

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Proms 2018: Philip Venables – Venables Plays Bartók; Laura Mvula – Love Like A Lion (World Premières); Agata Zubel – Fireworks (UK Première)

    by 5:4 August 22, 2018 • 06:00
    August 22, 2018 • 06:00

    The last few Proms premières have been, to put it mildly, an extremely mixed bag. By far the most excruciating of them was Venables Plays Bartók, a violin concerto of sorts by Philip Venables, given its first performance last Friday by Pekka Kuusisto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sakari Oramo. As its title …

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  • FestivalsInterviews

    Proms 2018: pre-première questions with Agata Zubel

    by 5:4 August 18, 2018 • 06:00
    August 18, 2018 • 06:00

    Tomorrow morning’s Prom concert, given by the European Union Youth Orchestra, includes the first UK performance of Fireworks, a recent work by Polish composer Agata Zubel. In anticipation of that, here are her answers to some of my pre-première questions (i’ve provided some information in lieu of answers for the final three …

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Eesti Muusika Paevad / Estonian Music Days 2025 World New Music Days 2025 Nils Henrik Asheim: Lydkilder Sound and Image: Aesthetics and Practices Music Beyond Airports: appraising ambient music Simon Cummings | 間 Studies vol. 6

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5:4
  • About
    • Other writings
  • Patrons
  • The Lists
    • Listening History
    • Complete List of Ratings
    • Compositions explored on 5:4
    • Albums and EPs reviewed on 5:4
    • Festivals reviewed on 5:4
    • Best Albums of the Years
    • The Proms premières – Poll results
  • The Dialogues
  • Mixtapes
    • Mixtapes
    • The Isolation Mixtapes
    • Mystery Mixtapes
    • Podcasts
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