Piotr Szymyślik/Silesian Quartet
(Chandos)
Heard together, the differences between Penderecki’s First and Fourth quartets map an epic journey in 20th-century music
Krzysztof Penderecki’s four numbered string quartets do not trace the course of his creative development anything like as faithfully as, say, the six quartets of Bartók or the five of Elliott Carter map the progress of those composers. A 40-year gap separated the composition of the Second Quartet in 1968 from the Third, an interval broken only by the tiny quartet movement Der unterbrochen Gedanke, written in 1988 as a memorial to Penderecki’s publisher.