Composer: Witold Lutosławski, Bryce Dessner, Sufjan Stevens, Krzysztof Penderecki, Jonny Greenwood
Orchestra: Australian Chamber Orchestra
Conductor: Richard Tognetti
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: ABC Classic
Release: 2022
Size: 1.1 GB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: cover
01. Lutosławski: Overture for Strings
Dessner: Réponse Lutosławski
02. I. Resonance
03. II. Preludio
04. III. Des Traces
05. IV. Warsaw Canon
06. V. Residue
Stevens: Suite from Run Rabbit Run (Arr. Michael Atkinson)
07. I. Year of the Ox
08. II. Enjoy Your Rabbit
09. III. Year of Our Lord
10. IV. Year of the Boar
Penderecki: Three Pieces in Baroque Style
11. I. Aria
12. Penderecki: String Quartet No. 1
Greenwood: Suite from There Will Be Blood
13. I. Open Spaces
14. II. Future Markets
15. III. HW / Hope of New Fields
16. IV. Proven Lands
17. V. Prospector’s Quartet
Live from City Recital Hall, Sydney, 2019
‘Indie’ cross-over composers and their Polish avant-garde heroes come together in a program about musical inheritance. The “Indies & Idols” program is an excellent example of artistic director Richard Tognetti’s flair for making a unified narrative out of the apparently eclectic. In this case – a meeting of the heroes of the Polish avant-garde with some contemporary ‘indie’ cross-over artists who admire them.
Tognetti thinks that the contemporary composers of “Indies & Idols” – Jonny Greenwood, Sufjan Stevens and Bryce Dessner – are the inheritors of what has been a “slow-motion response” to the upheavals of Modernism. This generation that I’m part of, and younger, have all responded to Modernism in a sort of slow dance, if you like”, he says. “It’s taken a long time.
The two musical threads of twentieth-century Polish music and contemporary American and British ‘Indie’ composers are interwoven. Beginning with an early work from Witold Lutosławski, immediately followed by Dessner’s homage to the Polish composer. Likewise, Greenwood names Penderecki as one of the reference-points for his score for There Will Be Blood, and so the Greenwood work is played in a medley with two works of the Polish master’s.
In between are the less explicit connections with Run Rabbit Run by Stevens. And the concert closes with a much earlier work – one which Tognetti cites as a personal favourite, and the work that anchors the program – an arrangement by Tognetti of Karol Szymanowski’s String Quartet No. 2 from 1927. This concert was recorded at Perth Concert Hall on 19 June 2019.