Piotr Grinholc (b. 1966)
Gloria in Excelsis Deo (2025)
Małgorzata Trojanowska (soprano), Aneta Łukaszewicz (mezzo-soprano), Rafał Bartmiński (tenor), Łukasz Konieczny (bass)
Kontrapunkt, unnamed orchestra/Rafał Sulima
rec. live, 1 June 2025, Church of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, Ełk, Poland
Acte Préalable AP0599 [49]
The Mayor of the Polish city of Ełk commissioned this work to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the city’s founding. (That was a very nice civic event, I think. No celebration whatsoever occurred in my English town 900 years after it was first recorded in the Domesday Book.)
Piotr Grinholc, the composer, was the recording engineer. He is a professional recording engineer, and an organist and organ teacher at the Catholic Academy in Warsaw, where he also teaches information technology. He leads organ improvisation and chamber music classes at the Karol Szymanowski State Music School Complex in Warsaw. He is in receipt of a national award for his teaching and artistic activities.
Grinholc’s music can be compared with that of Polish composers who have recently moved away from the apocalyptic dissonance of Penderecki’s earlier works into realms that embrace intimate devotion to the ritualistic and solemn. Grinholc exposes his experience in writing for film: his accessible style encompasses fluid melodic singing, with sparing dissonance. The orchestration is similarly grateful on the ear. The whole Gloria may be best described as largely homophonic, although for the last ten minutes or so the composer introduces a lively fugue that terminates with all the performers declaiming ‘Amen’. I would not say that Grinholc manages to produce a truly memorable melodic experience; the writing is tonally continuous, and dramatic climaxes are few, if any.
The live recording reveals some of the familiar challenges of performing and recording in an old church. Such buildings are often large, even cavernous, and their naturally reverberant acoustics can be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, a generous bloom can mask moments of less-than-perfect ensemble, wrapping the sound in a forgiving haze. On the other, depending on the echo characteristics of the space, lower percussion can easily become over‑resonant. That is very much the case here. Whenever the bass drum is struck, its effect swells outwards and momentarily overwhelms the rest of the texture.
Aside from this, the orchestra comes across well. Grinholc makes fairly frequent use of the bass drum, which only serves to highlight this particular acoustic quirk. I also noticed one brief moment when the chorus level drops unexpectedly, though it lasts only a few seconds. The congregation are blessedly silent until the applause at the end.
The four soloists are all really excellent; none of them deploys ‘expressive’ vibrato which seems so common in young British soloists. The nameless orchestra, rather good, is evidently a pickup ensemble. Its forty or so members are named in the excellently produced full-colour booklet, as are the members of the nearly identically sized choir. The booklet in Polish and English contains brief biographies of Piotr Grinholc, the singers and the conductor. The text of the Gloria, sung in Latin, is not printed as performed: there is much repetition, but it appears in its standard form in Latin, English and Polish.
Jim Westhead
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