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Written in fRoots issue 334, 2011
 

ZESPOL POLSKI MARII POMIANOWSKIEJ
At The Sources Of Chopin’s Music
Musart MUS 001 (2010)

MARIA POMIANOWSKA & FRIENDS
Chopin On 5 Continents
CM Records CM 1009 (2010)

Though Frédéric (in Polish Fryderyk) Chopin fled Poland from the Russian suppression of the November Uprising when he was 21 and never returned, the folk tunes he’d heard as he grew up remained an influence in his music, particularly his mazurkas inspired by mazureks from Mazovia. But in sound his piano-centred concert-hall pieces were far removed from the abrasive energy of traditional folk dance musicians.
     In At The Sources Of Chopin’s Music Maria Pomianowska aims, as she puts it, “to reduce folk music and Chopin’s mazurkas to a common denominator, to try to give the listener a completely new view on his music”. Beginning as a cellist and singer, she has been largely responsible for reviving the old Polish folk knee-fiddles, whose strings are touched by the player’s nails, rather as Bulgarian gadulka, and is their leading player. She also plays sarangi, gadulka and others of the worldwide family of vertical fiddles. In her Zespól Polski (‘Polish Group’), plus guests, she brings together a team skilled in the techniques of folk, early and classical music on instruments including hammered dulcimer, violin, hurdy-gurdy, bagpipe, duduk, shawm, koncovka and other whistles and flutes, throat-singing, cello, guitar, bass and percussion.
     They play ten of Chopin’s mazurkas as energetic band pieces open to exuberance and improvisation and sounding sometimes like early-music, sometimes closer to village music. Between, and during most of the later part of the album, come a variety of other non-Chopin instrumentals and songs from folk music, from the fast dances of springing triple-time oberek and duple-time polka to Pomianowska’s singing, with elegant bowed string arrangement, of the slow, autumnal Lament and Lipa and, to a wide, surging grainy soundscape, the passionate Hej Sw.Jónie, and ending with a live performance of a well-known oberek.
     Chopin On 5 Continents is a mighty piece of work in which Maria, bringing in this time 23 other musicians, takes Chopin on a world tour, interpreting thirteen of his tunes - not just from his Polish-related music but his wider oeuvre – from the musical perspectives of fourteen parts of the world. For example there’s a flamenco version of Waltz Op.28 No.4, an African vocal harmony and percussion treatment of his prelude Raindrop, a galloping throat-singing Siberian approach to Krakowiak Ronda Op.14, and a very natural, soaring meld of Largo From Fantasia-Impromptu Op.66 with Indian raga vocals and instrumentation. It ends back in Poland: A Young Girl’s Wish with three female singers in a rollicking waltz and a coda symbolically on Chopin’s instrument, piano.
     That description might suggest pastiche or stereotyping of some of the world’s musical traditions, or a lumpen folking up of Chopin, but it’s far from that. Each piece is finely wrought, not sticking slavishly to a style but drawing on what it needs, blending factors from traditional styles with Chopin’s tunes in such a melodic, creative and sensitive process of integration that the boundaries disappear and it just emerges as rich, beautifully wrought music full of a constantly shifting panoply of textures and approaches to scale, harmony and rhythm. In a remarkably natural, though clearly painstaking-to-achieve, way it not only levels the playing-field, it’s a great game.

www.musart.pl


© 2011 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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