One fascinating thing about
Krzysztof Penderecki
's music is that his creative personality remained consistent, whether he was expressing it in a folk-influenced Bartokian idiom early in his career, in the extremes of high modernism in the 1960s or in the neo-tonal, almost neo-Romantic style of his later years. There is a thread of intensity, of exploiting instrumental possibilities, of a quintessentially modern sense of living on the edge that runs through his whole output. This is nowhere more true than in
Penderecki
's chamber music, and the thread is what the
Meccore String Quartet
captures well here. Although
's chamber music is fairly abundantly recorded, and one might find recordings of individual pieces here that are more to one's liking, the album, as a whole, has a satisfying cohesion. Given that the notes stress the idea of knowing
through his quartets, it is a bit odd that the music isn't taken in chronological order, but of course, it can be listened to in any order. In any event, the
Shostakovich
-like
String Quartet No. 4
is placed last in the group and gets a fine, tense performance here. Another highlight is the lyrical
Clarinet Quartet
of 1993, with a haunting turn on the clarinet by
Jan Jakub Bokun
in the Serenade movement. The sound from the Krzysztof Penderecki European Centre for Music is quite hot, but this meshes well with the
Meccore
's general approach; the music here is "in your face" in the best way. This will fill a hole in many shelves or hard drives of European contemporary chamber music. ~ James Manheim