The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, with Penderecki's Threnody: To the Victims of Hiroshima

By WILLIAM DART

Judgment has been passed on Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody: To the Victims of Hiroshima, although we northerners have the chance to make up our own minds in a few days.

Reviewing the NZSO's Wellington concert, the Sunday Star-Times dismissed this important and powerful work as "pretentiously barren". With many others who care about and respect exploratory music, I find this crude assessment unacceptable.

This brilliant piece for 52 stringed instruments was first heard at Warsaw's Autumn Festival in September 1961 and music was never the same afterwards. Composer David Farquhar was there and remembers it as "excitingly sonic".

It was influential for younger composers. For Christopher Blake, Threnody was "seminal, the ultimate in transferring an event into sound". For Eve de Castro Robinson, it was "a shriek of searing political commentary acting as an eloquent shock to the senses".

This score takes no prisoners. If you have a cosy affection for Haydn's Farewell Symphony as music of social protest, then Penderecki's Threnody is radical politics. The very fabric of the art was being reinvented with clusters of notes, the chattering clatter of special string techniques and sounds meted out in seconds rather than crotchets and quavers.

In a recent Arthaus DVD featuring a performance of the composer's Seventh Symphony, Penderecki talks revealingly about his earlier piece, in a documentary by Andreas Missler-Morell.

Thanks to DVD technology, we can see the influence of electronic music in the oscillating soundwaves superimposed on the Threnody score, and Penderecki playfully points out that his novel way of writing was concocted because he had to work on scraps of paper in a cafe.

Thirty or more years ago, New Zealand musicians took the eminently practical Penderecki to their hearts. Peter Godfrey's Dorian Singers gave us his marvellous Stabat Mater, and Threnody was studied by thousands of School Certificate candidates during the 70s and 80s, the same generations that would take a stand on Mururoa.

And how do the musicians find it? Bass player Victoria Jones is blown away by Penderecki "managing to cram 52 notes into just over two octaves" [a piano manages 24] and that "this sound lasts half a minute".

After some years playing with Wellington's contemporary music group, Stroma, she feels she really "wants to do this music right".

"It's not a case of 'let's play this C sharp a bit out of tune and it might be all right'," Jones says. "I started to play scales in quarter-tones to try to hear them as real notes. If you do that, it's amazing how big a semitone sounds afterwards."

Jones agrees there are unique subtleties in this music. During those bars where extraordinary sound piles on extraordinary sound - pizzicato on the highest note followed by full-frontal if fleeting attacks on bridges, tail-pieces and other nether regions of the instrument - "15 seconds fly by but when you're playing one note for the same time it seems to go on forever. 'Oh my God,' you think, 'have I missed a cue'?"

Concertgoers are in danger of missing things if they don't take up the NZSO's challenge. Despite its fascinating sound world, Threnody is more than just an 8m 37s CD track.

A good part of the fascination lies in watching the sound being created - sculptural clusters are built up and deflated, manic detonations are passed around from player to player, and that hair-raising final 52-note chord.

This music should be experienced live. Works like this don't come around too often. I last caught it on an NZSO programme in 1970; I may not be around for the 2036 revival.

* At Founders Theatre, Hamilton, Thursday 8pm; Auckland Town Hall, Friday 6.30pm