Penderecki: Complete Quartets (2021)

It is said, including by the annotator here, that Penderecki made a 180-degree stylistic turn in mid-career and that the composer's four string quartets, with a 40-year gap between the Second and Third, are not especially useful in tracing his stylistic evolution. However, the situation is not quite as it appears, as the Silesian Quartet nicely makes clear here. There were some milestones, but Penderecki's stylistic shifts were actually gradual in some respects. The String Quartet No. 2 is less sonically extreme than the ... Read More

It is said, including by the annotator here, that Penderecki made a 180-degree stylistic turn in mid-career and that the composer's four string quartets, with a 40-year gap between the Second and Third, are not especially useful in tracing his stylistic evolution. However, the situation is not quite as it appears, as the Silesian Quartet nicely makes clear here. There were some milestones, but Penderecki's stylistic shifts were actually gradual in some respects. The String Quartet No. 2 is less sonically extreme than the first quartet, and the String Quartet No. 4 of 2016 comes closer to neo-Romanticism than the String Quartet No. 3 of eight years earlier, although Penderecki never really becomes a neo-Romantic (just as even his avant-garde early music has a Bartókian aspect that links it to classical traditions). The Silesian Quartet does well to include not only the short string quartet Der unterbrochene Gedanke of 1988 but also the rather rarely played Quartet for clarinet and string trio of 1993.... Read Less