“Chamber works is my path to music’s materia prima,” Penderecki said in 1993. A change in aesthetic emphasis can be seen in his chamber music, which, in the 1990s, regained a significant place in the composer’s oeuvre – to combine a temperance of expression with formal lucidity and euphony of sound. This reference to the classical understanding of beauty is also present in Sextet, composed in 1999-2000. Its premiere took place at the Musikverein in Vienna on 7 June 2000.
Sextet consists of two movements of contrasting expression and tempo. They are united by common musical motives, not devoid of echoes of rhetorical gestures from Ubu Rex. The original instrumentation – clarinet, French horn, string trio and piano – allows the composer to produce a rich palette of tone colour and various ways of concert play. Chamber-like dialogues of individual instruments are set against tutti fragments, where the ensemble achieves the volume of a small orchestra.
• The vivid and capricious Movement One (Allegro moderato) abounds in sudden changes of action and associations with dancing metre. It is dominated by a grotesque tone and march-like rhythm. Its dynamic musical narration is twice obstructed by entries of slow and lyrical fragments to anticipate the mood of the second movement. This first part resolves in a final tempestuous climax.
• The slow Movement Two (Larghetto), with its intensive emotionality and a tragic and resigned tone, is twice as long as the first. Its narration, based on chamber-like dialogues, becomes enlivened and dramatically amplified in short segments that relate to Movement One. The music dwindles in the instruments’ final lamentations and falls silent at a consolatory chord.

Ewa Siemdaj