Violin Concerto No. 2 ‘Metamorphosen’

Program notes

About the Work

Krzysztof Penderecki wrote his Second Violin Concerto for the violinist who plays it in these concerts. He and Anne-Sophie Mutter had performed Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto together in 1988, and the idea of a concerto for her came out of that meeting. The commission came from Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, the public broadcaster in Leipzig. Penderecki worked on the score, with interruptions, from 1992 to 1995, and Mutter gave the first performance in Leipzig on 24 June 1995 with the MDR Symphony Orchestra under Mariss Jansons. The concerto is dedicated to her. She went on to record it with the London Symphony Orchestra, the composer conducting, and the recording won a Grammy Award in 1999.

By then Penderecki had been through several changes of style. He made his name around 1960 as a leader of the Polish avant-garde, with pieces such as the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, where string instruments are made to produce clusters, slides and noises. In the mid-1970s he turned towards the language of late Romanticism, and the work that announced the change was his First Violin Concerto, written for Isaac Stern. The Second came two decades after it. The violin was the instrument he had learned as a boy, and he wrote for it with inside knowledge.

Commentators usually set the two concertos side by side. Both are single movements of nearly forty minutes. The First is the darker of the two; the Second is described as lighter in colour and more lyrical, although nobody would call it a cheerful piece. Its tone is serious from the first bar to the last.

The title is the German plural: metamorphoses. It describes how the music is made. A short chromatic motif of a few notes, heard near the start, is transformed again and again, and most of what follows can be traced back to it. The result has been described as a set of symphonic variations on a single theme, in which the orchestra carries as much of the argument as the soloist. The concerto plays without a break for about 38 minutes, and is usually divided into six linked sections that differ in tempo and character.

The solo part is long and exhausting. The violin is seldom silent, and it has to move between fierce passagework, sustained singing lines and a big cadenza. Mutter has remained the concerto’s chief advocate, and played it with several orchestras in 2018, the year of the composer’s 85th birthday.

What to Listen For

The opening belongs to the strings: a steady, pulsing tread that one critic likened to a heartbeat, with the violas prominent in setting out the theme. Fix the small chromatic figure in your ear here, because it is the seed of the whole piece. When the soloist enters, the line climbs quickly into the high register and the tension rises with it.

After that, follow the changes of mood more than the changes of theme. The same motif comes back as angry protest, as slow lament and, in a fast scherzo-like episode, as something close to satire. The orchestra is not there to accompany. Soloist and players argue, interrupt and console each other, and some of the most telling passages are duets between the violin and a single section, the violas above all.

Two stretches stand out. One is a slower, inward passage where the violin sings quietly over very little. The other is the cadenza, which is long, ferocious and written in the tradition of the nineteenth-century virtuoso concerto, though the harmony is of its own time.

The ending is the passage that writers on the piece return to most. The energy drains away over a long-held note deep in the double basses, with cellos plucking above it; the violin makes a few last restless excursions, and the concerto closes quietly, far from where it began.