Wojciech Kilar’s September Symphony and Lament: Antoni Wit and the Warsaw Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, Henryk Wojnarowski and the Warsaw Philharmonic Choir; CD Accord
What can an artist possibly do when faced with a tragedy like September 11? That was the question facing composer Wojciech Kilar after witnessing the towers fall. The music on this CD Accord disc represents his answer to the question: the September Symphony and the Lament for a cappella chorus.
A Polish composer, Kilar calls himself “indiscriminately pro-American,” a trait that “started with Mickey Mouse and cowboys and finished with Faulkner and American composers.” He is especially fond of “Johnny Cage,” to whom he says “music after the 1950s owes a lot.”
Kilar is famous in his native Poland as one of the “Vintage 33” composers (he and fellow Polish composers Henryk Górecki and Krzysztof Penderecki were all born in 1933). The Vintage 33 had more than the birth year in common — each initially made waves as avant-garde composers, then independently rejected that direction of composing and began pursuing more Romantic musical paths.
Kilar has composed music to commemorate tragedy before; for example, his Ode to Béla Bartók in Memoriam was inspired by and dedicated to Hungarians after the Soviets crushed Hungary in 1956. His Koscielec 1909 commemorates the death of the Polish composer Miecszyslaw Karlowicz beneath an avalanche in Maly Koscielec in 1909. His Requiem Father Kolbe remembers the Polish priest, Father Maximilian Kolbe, who as a prisoner in Auschwitz under the Nazis volunteered to die in the place of a condemned prisoner because the other man had a family.
Kilar is most famous internationally for his film music — he has written the scores to well over a hundred Polish films; his Requiem Father Kolbe is based on music he wrote for a film about Kolbe entitled “A Life for a Life.” After the fall of Communism in Poland in 1989, Kilar wrote a handful of scores for American films. Those include “The Ninth Gate” in 1999, “The Portrait of a Lady” in 1996, “Death and the Maiden” in 1994, and most notably “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in 1992. Kilar says he has stopped composing film music, but last year he did compose the theme to “The Pianist.”
On this disc, the Warsaw Philharmonic Choir under the baton of Henryk Wojnarowski performs the Lament, and the Warsaw Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Antoni Wit performs the September Symphony. The sound quality is excellent, as is the performance of the choir and the orchestra. The symphony was recorded live on Sept. 11, 2003, but the recording is not hampered by coughing or other ambient noise.
The opening Lament is based on 15th century Polish verses about a recently disembodied soul who is sad because she is not certain where to go. The concluding lines translate into:
Come my dear little soul!
Let me show you the way to paradise,
To the heavenly kingdom of the skies.
The September Symphony, Kilar’s first symphony outside of his student compositions, is a traditional-feeling four-movement work. The first movement, marked Largo, opens with a falling, six-note motif, itself given in three groups of two notes, played on the brass. The motif is heard twice, and then strings answer in a haunting, organ-like passage. The atmosphere depicted seems blighted. The motif on brass returns, and the strings reply more somberly. The woodwinds enter cautiously on a slowly rising theme, but a horrendous crash seems to dash their hopes. Strings murmur over the events, and then there is silence. A lone clarinet mourns, joined by an oboe. The strings play a solemn hymn. At its closing, a trumpet plays a soft, four-note tribute.
The second movement, Allegro, opens very energetically with staccato strings striking the same note repeatedly with a few bursts of a higher pitch. Despite the energy, this is very static music, and it sounds ominous — it seems to threaten the symphony with oppressive monotony. The frenetic pace continues throughout the movement; the original theme gives way to growling brass and then swirling woodwinds, all repetitive in their own ways, before it returns to conclude as monotonously as it began. In a way this movement’s vigorous, demanding conformity seems reminiscent of the forced “Soviet apotheosis” at the end of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. Would it be too much to wonder if this is not Kilar’s portrait of the terrorists and their vicious, exacting worldview that tolerates no dissent?
The third movement, Largo, returns to the atmosphere at the conclusion of the first. Cellos introduce a theme comprising two-note clusters, similar to the symphony’s opening but fluctuating rather than falling. After the first full statement of this theme, violas enter and take it into their register while the cellos play accompaniment. This process continues upwards through the strings, each iteration richer and more entrancing than the previous. A pivotal point is reached, and the movement seems headed to a dark place but instead finds light. The brass enter with a hymnic refrain similar to the theme of the strings, with flutes occasionally adding commentary. The cellos return with their theme, but it is shortened, as if the orchestra wishes to speed its evolution. A critical point is reached, and again darkness and despair seem to be the destination, but instead light and peace are achieved. A Coplandesque coda follows, and over this gentle expanse a celesta sounds a four-note phrase, similar to that of the trumpet at the conclusion of the first but brighter in aspect. Its phrase is the falling two-note motif with each note doubled — O beautiful… the opening phrase of America, the Beautiful.
The fourth movement, Moderato, starts on an industrious melodic line played by cellos. After a repeat, a piano joins to mark time and the other strings join in succession, swelling the theme until brass join and try to take it to a statement of triumph and conclusion. It is too soon; the strings revisit the symphony’s mournful opening. Suddenly the monotonous staccato of the Allegro assaults the symphony on strings and timpani; the orchestra joins it and fights it from within with harmonic plurality, and eventually it succeeds in assimilating it into a proud proclamation of the movement’s opening theme. This triumph is final, even reaching to a victorious declaration in the brass of the symphony’s opening, six-note motif. A silence follows, then remembrance. The symphony closes on a wistful note, seemingly peaceful, but its final chord leaves a question lingering.