String Quartet No.2 Quasi una Fantasia (1990–91)

Largo sostenuto, mesto

Deciso energico – Furioso – Tranquillo mesto

Arioso: Adagio cantabile

Allegro sempre con grande passione e molto marcato – Lento tranquillissimo

Gorecki’s Second String Quartet is clearly by the same Polish composer who, out of the blue, sprang into worldwide prominence with what was actually the fourth recording of his “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” in the mid-1990s. While he is less sorrowful in this work, which was completed 15 years after the Symphony, he still expresses his concern for fundamental issues in his own way and in his own unhurried time. What the Quartet is “about” is difficult to say but the allusion to “Holy night, silent night” shortly before the end must be a significant clue. The score is marked Tranquillissimo at this point, which represents the ultimate in peacefulness in a work which touches elsewhere on the opposite extremes of Molto furioso and Ferocissimo. There is also what Gorecki calls a “Beethovenian” presence, as one might guess from the subtitle Quasi una fantasia, which is also attached to the “Moonlight” Sonata.

The largely inscrutable first movement – where the cello plays the same E natural nearly 400 times in succession while the viola extends a melodic line above it – is more a prelude to the conflict of extremes than a participant. It ends, however, with three “Beethovenian” chords played very quietly and Tranquillissimo. The second movement – where the long-suffering cello is restricted, with the viola this time, to the same two-note chord almost throughout – is anything but tranquil. Even so, its folk-dance derived ferocity does give way, after a long-sustained silence, to a reminder of the “Beethovenian” chords. The cello is allowed a little but not much more freedom in the Arioso, where the increasingly passionate and increasingly ferocious melodic interest is confined largely to the two violins playing in dissonant parallel.

The last movement, which begins with the cello and viola projecting a forceful melody under an ostinato on the violins, is driven furiously ahead until a con massima passione climax collapses onto a very quiet Tranquillissimo allusion to “Silent night” on first violin over one of the “Beethovenian” chords sustained by the other three instruments. The work ends, in peace, with a neatly conclusive recall of the still inscrutable first movement.