Panufnik - Sinfonia Mistica; Sinfonia di Sfere

In the last decade of the LP era, Decca Head was an interesting label published by British Decca and devoted contemporary music. It had very few installments - I've been able to retrace no more than 21 releases, including three double-LPs - but each was significant. They offered Antal Dorati's essential premiere recording of Messiaen's "Des Canyons aux Etoiles", Roberto Gerhard's opera "The Plague" and Dallapiccola's "Il Prigioniero" with again Dorati heading the Washington Opera forces, Birtwistle's "Punch & Judy" and more.

A number of these Decca Head recordings have been reissued on CD (not Il Prigioniero, inexplicably, along with, if my count is right, six others), including a number in the early 1990s by Decca/London in their "Entreprise" series. Now Explore Records has picked up a few of them. I've reviewed the fine Xenakis disc (Decca Head 13, Xenakis: Synaphai; Aroura; Antikhthon) and Takemitsu's piano music by Roger Woodward (Decca Head 4, Takemitsu: Corona; For Away; Piano Distance; Undisturbed Rest). These two Panufnik Symphonies conducted by David Atherton, recorded in 1978, came on Decca Head 22, one of the label's last releases.

I'm not all that familiar with the music of Panufnik, whom I tend to categorize among the "mildly modern" composers from the second half of the 20th Century, not belonging to the avant-garde, and certainly less advanced in his musical language and less original than his two compatriots Penderecki (the composer of the 1960s and early 1970s at least) and Lutoslawski, but not either to the most backward-looking neo-Romantics. I've found his 8th Symphony (Sinfonia Votiva) a superb and haunting work, in the austere sparseness and delicacy of its instrumentation and stylistic independence of its language (Symphony 8 / Concerto for Orchestra or Andrzej Panufnik: Sinfonia Votiva (Symphony No. 8) / Roger Sessions: Concerto for Orchestra - Boston Symphony Orchestra), but his 2nd, the Sinfonia Elegiaca, as performed by the Louisville Orchestra (Andrzej Panufnik: Nocturn / Rhapsody / Symphony 2), somewhat clichéd and bombastic.

I found these two Symphonies highly enjoyable. Sinfonia Mistica comes first on the CD although it is the later composition, Panufnik's 6th from 1977. Sinfonia di Sfere, completed in 1975, is the composer's 5th. Its first performance was given on 13 April 1976 by the very same forces involved on this recording. Both are recording premieres and remained for long the only available ones. It is still the case with Sinfonia Mistica, but Sinfonia di Sfere has had one further recording, by the finnish Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra under John Storgards - which I haven't heard (Panufnik: Heroic Overture; Sinfonia de Sfere; Landscape; Sinfonia Sacra [Hybrid SACD]). Coming back to this review one year later (July 2009), I now have the score to Sinfonia di Sfere and, other than an occasional secondary theme played col legno on violas that I can't hear, Atherton's reading is impressively precise. The sound is excellent, with no perceptible tape hiss.

The liner notes describe how the 6th Symphony's architecture, harmony, melodic intervals are all built on the number 6 - but those "kitchen details" are not what counts. The music alternates between the mystical, playing on soft string harmonics (the early Messiaen from "Offrandes Oubliées" looms large, and so does the "mystical" Ives of Central Park in the Dark) or brooding low strings (the 5th movement stages a superb slow descent from the high spheres to the lowest registers of, what? the sleep of death perhaps ), and the more agitated and menacing. The symphony ends in a grandiose peroration. The orchestration is full of ear-catching touches. There are six movements but only four cues, unfortunately.

The same comments apply to the Symphony of Spheres, whose architecture is even more complex and tightly-knit as the 6th's, and the orchestral invention as rich and attention-catching. The disc's liner notes aren't entirely informative on this complex architecture, but the composer's own description is available on his publisher's website, Boosey & Hawkes. The spheres of the title refer not to any religious or philosophical concept but to the symmetry which organises all the musical material, harmony, rhythm, dynamics, tempo and structure. The symphony gets here six cue points, but they correspond not so much to clear-cut new sections as to changes of tempo and atmosphere: but there are more, not all are cued. The alternation of slow-serene-meditative and fast-agitated-menacing movements - one of the composer's favorite architectural devices, if somewhat predictable - is here used in a much more complex way than in Sinfonia Mistica. Four brass instruments (trumpet, horn, trombone, tuba) assume important solo roles, with the recurrence in the first and third "sections" of an austere theme played first by trumpet against a counterpoint of anguished strings, then later in the first "section" by trombone punctuated by soft-piano tintinnabulations reminiscent of Messiaen's birds. The way this theme rises in the upper registers, passing from one instrument to the other, at the end of the third section is a particularly arresting touch. The piano is also prominent in the orchestration, as well as three sets of four untuned drums, spread out in a triangle left-front, center back and right-front of the orchestra, unleashed in wild violence at the beginning of the penultimate section (not "molto andante" as the booklet indicates but "molto allegro", and very impressive; the "molto andante" comes at 2:08in the same track 9). Panufnik's organization of an architecture of tension and repose, his alternation of tense drama and brooding serenity in a language that is modern but accessible, makes for a very rewarding musical journey.

One drawback of the Explore reissues has been their short TT of circa 40+ minutes, acceptable maybe for an LP but frustrating for a CD. The problem is not so bad here: the TT is an acceptable 53 minutes, and, again, this is the only available recording of the superb Sinfonia Mistica.