The Slipped Disc daily comfort zone (42): There’s more to Gorecki

MrK says:

Ain’t that Elżbieta Chojnacka?

john says:

I don’t know any Paderewki. There’s Paderewski.

John Borstlap says:

It is not a concerto for harpsichord and strings, but a piece (not a concerto) for strings with accompaniment of a harpsichord. And it is a very primitive piece, not in the sense of Stravinsky’s primitivism which was a sophisticated, very inventive invocation of primitivism (‘primitive but with all the modern comforts’ as Debussy said), but primitive in the sense of laking ideas and sophistication. One simplistic idea is milked-out till halfway of the piece, the ‘solo instrument’ only perceptable as a noise in the background, then 1 minute where you can actually hear the soloist, then it disappears again in the hammering nonsense till 8:41 with the shortest solo in the repertoire – merely a little fragment – and then, finished. Two ideas in which hardly any thinking has gone, milked-out in fortissimo repetitions, in such unsophisticated way, without any apparant understanding of what a harpsichord is and how it combines with other instruments – it’s not serious. Even for a student the piece would have to be dismissed as incompetent.