Paul Kletzki (1900-1973)
The Complete String Quartets
String Quartet No. 1 in A minor, Op. 1 (1923)
String Quartet No. 2 in C minor, Op. 13 (1925)
String Quartet No. 3 in D minor, Op. 23 (1931)
String Quartet No. 4 (1942) (completed by Adam Manijak)
Bacewicz String Quartet
rec. 2025, Grażyna & Kiejstut Bacewicz Academy of Music, Łódź, Poland
Prelude Classics PCL2501000 [2 CDs: 140]
I know of Paul Kletzki (I am sure I have also seen his name rendered as ‘Klecki’) first and foremost as a conductor. His Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade has long been a fixture, ever since vinyl days, and still holds court in the elite groves of the label Testament. His Sibelius, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Brahms, Borodin, Beethoven and Bloch are notable. So far as the ever expanding recording archives are concerned, he is much associated with Johanna Martzy and with Yehudi Menuhin. He was an active composer as a glance at Wiki will confirm. He figured in IMG’s glowing and capacious Great Conductors of the Twentieth Century series.
His musical legacy has made slow but steady headway, at least so far as recordings are concerned. There’s his Violin Concerto, Piano Concerto and Symphony No. 2. As to his chamber music, it has had some attention including two non-string quartet works on Dux. The excellent notes for this well-caparisoned issue are in Polish and English. There, Karol Furtak recounts that Kletzki’s composing career ran from 1923 to 1942. After that it was overtaken by conducting. His works speak as Hidden Voices and those two words are the title of this satisfying project.
The Bacewicz String Quartet approach the quartets as a labour of admiration, perhaps love. It proffers world premiere recordings of Paul Kletzki’s complete string quartets – all four of them. Numbers 3 and 4 are world premiere recordings. The last was realised from sketches.
The first two quartets and the fourth are in three movements apiece; the third has four movements. Quartet No.1 is romantically entwining in an amalgam of the styles of Kreisler, Korngold and Schoeck and, before them, Bruch. A longingly tenderly sentimental Largo makes way for a Vivo which is dotted with dignified episodes. The whole work, just short of half an hour playing time, is ambitious – and confident in its ambitions. It ends deftly and in sublime assurance. For 1923 the First Quartet looks back on, and inhabits, a tradition that was under assault from the Second Viennese School; not forgetting that Schoenberg started out in saturated romance in such works as his 1899 Nocturne for strings and harp. It’s passionate and enjoyable if you have developed a taste for John Foulds’s Quartetto Intimo.
Only two years later came his Second Quartet. Aurally, this charts Kletzki’s journey outwards from tonality. There are long episodes of uncomplicated emotionality that are touching and lachrymose, often prayerful, but the musical world is more complicated than the world ‘created’ by hearing the First Quartet. The finale, while not immune from passionate and painful assaults, skips playfully and is reminiscent of both middle- and late-period Frank Bridge.
The Third Quartet is the only one in four movements. Written soon after Kletzki completed his first two symphonies, it harks back to the cantorial style of the First Quartet but is a degree more emotionally complex. Its second movement is a sort of Mephistophelian perpetuum mobile: a spidery firefly of a thing. The long Andante sostenuto third movement is a lugubrious fugal construct; again it is prayerful and subdued. It established this mood while dancing attendance to a delight just out of reach. A wild eyed finale is then unleashed – letting slip the dogs of war.
The last quartet, the one magicked together out of sketches, is by turns probingly cold, glumly otherworldly and piquantly contrived: a spider’s web in three dimensions. There is passion there, but cloaked in the scaffolding of the then avant-garde. The quartet ends quietly in an expression of undemonstrative, calm conviction – very moving.
The sound, taken down in Kletzki’s birthplace city, Łódź, is intense, warmly cultured, engaging and very forward. By the way, for this recording project, the Bacewicz String Quartet comprised Ludwika Maja Tomaszewska-Klimek (violin), Hanna Drzewiecka-Borucka (violin), Róża Wilczak (viola), Małgorzata Smyczyńska-Szulc (cello). Their performances are carefully weighted without being stilted or losing touch with the passion which suffuses these scores.
Rob Barnett
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