Portland Chamber Orchestra: "Strings Attached" with music by Wojcieck Kilar

Wojciech Kilar, born on 17 July 1932 in Lwów (formerly Poland, now in Ukraine), is today one of Poland's premier symphonic composers. After graduation from the State Higher School of Music in Katowice he was awarded a French Government Grant which enabled him to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris; a city he still considers his second home. Wojciech Kilar has been awarded numerous international prizes for composition, among them are the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Award of Boston in 1960, the Jurzykowski Foundation Award of New York in 1983, the State Award Grade I in 1980, the awards of the Minister of Culture in 1967, 1976, and 1975, the prize of the Polish Composers' Union in 1975, and the A.S.C.A.P.Award for his score from Coppola's Dracula in Los Angeles in 1992.

His music from the 1970's and 80's is less complicated; it seems to be written from sheer delight, out of an authentic need. Orawa (1986) sounds almost like symphonic poems from the period of Romanticism or post-Romanticism where he presents the "spiritual essence" of the Tatra Mountains with incomparable suggestiveness; he paints a musical picture of nature in the mountains and of human response to its awesome beauty. Many Poles would call the Tatras their spiritual homeland.

The title of Kilar's piece Orawa refers to the Carpathian region on the Polish-Slovak border, criss-crossed by the river of the same name. The word is also reminiscent of 'Olawa', which denotes a mountain pasture, its grass cover trampled by sheep and on which young shepherds celebrated the end of the grazing period with a rumbustious 'robbers' dance. Orawa is kind of a musical painting of mountain nature and the highland folk. It is a dialectic of nostagia and elements of nature, broadly phrased and saturated with primeval rhythms. The pentatonic and scalic ideas serve to give the work an archaic character. The echos reverberating from the mountain slopes affect the sounds and approaches of the musicians performing practice. The music of nature and folk music (deeply rooted in nature) form an inseparable entity, professing, as it were, a pantheistic outlook. Orawa had its first performance by the Polish Chamber Orchestra on March 10 1986 in the Tatra capital of Zakopane.

It is worth drawing a parallel between Gorecki and Kilar at this point. When composing Orawa, Kilar was not beset by the sort of problems that preoccupied Gorecki when writing Three Pieces in Old Style. It was a time of post-modernism and Kilar had no qualms about subscribing to the post-modernist ideology. In Orawa he safely entered into an aesthetic situation that he himself had helped to create. In this score, even the final 'Hej' of the members of the orchestra, who of all a sudden change into musicians of a highland band, does not break the convention but merely rounds it off in a natural way.

In the latter part of the 1960s, both Kilar and Gorecki embarked on the path of reductionism, by creating a peculiar version of Polish minimalism (solidified in terms of expressive features - that's what makes it so unique!). This was an expressionistic minimalism, in other words a minimalism that was maximalist in terms of expression. The two composers, both from Katowice and the Tatras and both deeply associated with Polish Catholicism, infused Polish music of the 1970s with two elements: of musical antiquity (old Polish music) and of musical wildness (highland folk). Both Gorecki and Kilar, once belonging to the 'angry young men' at the time of the birth of the Warsaw Autumn Festival, in the Three Pieces in Old Style and Orawa took up an idiom which the previous epoch wished to confine (for aesthetic, ideological and political reasons) to a musical museum of times long gone.

-- research compiled by Yaacov Bergman