Roxanna Panufnik: Heartfelt
Signum Classics

In liner notes for this wide-ranging selection of music by Roxanna Panufnik (b. 1968), the versatile British composer is quoted as saying, “Music, for me, is all about the heart.” Don't interpret that to mean her works are sentimental but rather that each piece is humanized by the particular interpretation she brings to it. That said, Panufnik wouldn't be averse to fashioning a piece as sentimental if the idea associated with the material called for such a treatment. As this eighty-minute release reveals, she less imposes her personality on her pieces than uses her familiarity with multiple idioms and musical cultures to give idiosyncratic form to the character each work demands.

Though she's written opera and orchestral compositions, the smaller scale of the arrangements on Heartfelt lends it a pronounced feeling of intimacy. Soprano Mary Bevan, baritone Roderick Williams, oboist Nicholas Daniel, bassoonist Amy Harman, double bassist Andy Marshall, and pianist Charles Owen all take part, with the Sacconi Quartet (violinists Ben Hancox, Hannah Dawson, violist Robin Ashwell, cellist Cara Berridge) involved in all seven pieces (Ashwell features on Canto alone, and Dawson performs Hora Bessarabia with Marshall).

Representative of Panufnik's approach are the framing works, the five-part song cycle Private Joe and the two-part title work for string quartet. Scored for baritone and string quartet, the former originated in 2000 when baritone Nigel Cliffe showed Panufnik two letters written by his great-uncle, Private Joe Wood, during WWI and sent six days apart to his sister Mary and her husband Tom, three weeks before Joe was killed in action in 1917. Panufnik augmented the movements she composed for those letters with three inner ones, all relating in key ways to war experience. In each case the music mirrors the tone of the text, with Joe's first missive light-hearted and the second resigned by comparison (Williams's cockney-styled readings effectively relay the soldier's personality); whereas the wry trench song “And When I Die” is gallows humour at its best (and includes background vocals from the Sacconi Quartet), the words by Alec Waugh in “From Albert to Bapaume” find their expressions of loneliness and desolation likewise reflected in the music's bleak tone.

At disc's end, the title work is as striking for the story behind its second movement, “Lament for a Bulgarian Dancing Bear.” Drawing for inspiration from the time in 2006-07 when dancing bears became illegal in Bulgaria, Panufnik used an actual bear's heartbeat to set the rhythm and tempo, which is played throughout the Bulgarian folk-influenced movement by the string quartet's different players. Through a cellist friend, she discovered that the Bristol Zoo was about to perform a surgical procedure on a young brown bear called Albie and managed to have a recording of the heartbeat captured by a digital stethoscope (that's Albie on the album cover, by the way). Emblematic of Panufnik's approach, the first movement, “Uzbek Processional,” vividly conjures the image of a caravan travelling down the Silk Road, and the work's title? When the Sacconi Quartet commissioned Heartfelt in 2019, the group was participating in a multi-media experiment that saw audiences connected to the performers' heart monitors via Wi-Fi, an innovative idea that understandably captivated Panufnik.

Joining those bookends are one vocal and four instrumental settings, starting with the engrossing solo viola piece Canto, for which the composer used the Ashkenazi Jewish Cantorial chant “Y'hi rotzon” (“May it be Thy will”) as a springboard. Following it are Letters from Burma, written in 2004 and inspired by letters Aung San Suu Kyi sent between 1995 and 1996 to a Japanese newspaper to describe Burmese Culture. Panufnik incorporates aspects of Burmese traditional music into its four movements, performed resonantly by oboist Daniel and the string quartet. Again she tailors the music to accord with details in the letters, with the “tiny exquisite blooms” described by Suu Kyi captured by the composer in “Thazin” (a Burmese orchid) with delicacy and grace and “Kintha Dance” naturally buoyant. Violinist Dawson and double bassist Marshall give empathetic voice to the lively Eastern European Gypsy music-inspired flavourings of Hora Bessarabia, after which the romantic aromatics of Cantator & Amanda fill the air, with Berridge's cello personifying the former and Harman's bassoon the latter. Responding to a fourteenth-century legend about the doomed love between a monk and a local girl, Panufnik fashioned material of quietly rapturous character, though a tone of lamentation pervades the conclusion in keeping with the story's tragic end. Accompanied by piano quintet and delivering the words in their original rural dialect, Bevan brings Second Home, four dramatic variations based on a folksong from Poland, to life with a vibrant and, yes, heartfelt vocal performance.

The seven chamber settings presented on the release do much to bring Panufnik into focus, even if they exemplify an exceptionally broad range. In all instances, the impression established is of a composer determinedly allowing the originating idea to profoundly influence the shape of the musical outcome. Humour and drama are both present, and the recording is never less than compelling for the imaginative terrain it encompasses and for the wholly committed performances by the personnel involved.

June 2021