PANUFNIK: MESSAGES CHILINGIRI

Although Andrzej Panufnik's three string quartets are relatively late works, the second of them—subtitled Messages—is actually a delayed musical reaction to a childhood experience. Even at the age of seven, Panufnik was fascinated by the musical potential of non-musical sounds; he would press his ear against a telegraph pole and listen "to sounds produced by the poles vibrating in the wind" (Panufnik's own description)--a radical metaphor, surely, for the principles underlying the construction of stringed instruments. No wonder he allotted his "fantasy-poem" to a quartet, the ideal medium for expressing high-reaching sonorities and relentless tonal squabbling. While the Second Quartet (1980) recalls the outdoor nocturnals of Bartok and Szymanowski, the First—a product of 1976—opens with urgent, strongly differentiated chatter. But at 312" (track 1), Panufnik switches to luminous, long-breathed lines; subdued, shifting and rising (630") to an ethereal height. Like the symphonies, the qu