To begin with I get the impression of a modern fin-du-siècle Piano Abend in someone’s stately home in Warsaw or Stockholm, dark curtains, brownish furniture, some oriental or African artifacts on the walls, a big rug – and the grand piano, at which Niklas Sivelöv sits… but, anachronistically – or perhaps just time-bridgingly – in a contemporeana-permeated tradition of old. Does it sound strange or unlikely? Sometimes art is, forcing you to see things with new eyes, or maybe to have a change of heart. However stuck you may be in ways of perceiving the piano, this CD with the music of Wlodek Gulgowski won’t leave you indifferent. Chance is both traditionalists and avant-gardes will like the music just as much!

The first piece – Toccata – moves in hasty, jumpy passages, in virtuoso progressions and in a flowing consistency of pianist craftsmanship; beads of ebony and ivory shining, gleaming – dancing away!

It is not at all a self-evident occurrence, when Wlodek Gulgowski produces these intricate art music gestures on CD. His studies began in Poland, where he comes from, in the city of Lodz, where he studied with Professor Zygmunt Jesman.
However, those classical studies finished, he went into improvisation and jazz, and this is when interesting things are beginning to happen, which could lead up to the music on this CD, which would not have materialized, had Gulgowski stayed in a purely classical environment.
The composer came to Sweden already in 1965, and stayed there, working as pianist, arranger and… composer! An observation is that he collaborated with the group Made In Sweden at that time.
On his journey through musical styles and atmospheres, he moved to the U.S.A., remaining there for five years, collaborating with different musicians. After that he returned to Sweden. 1984 – 1986 he studied with his famous fellow countryman Witold Lutoslawski, who used to stay the summers in neighboring Norway.
During his compositional life, Wlodek Gulgowski has written primarily for the piano, but in addition he has much theatre and film music to his credit, also for renowned and well-known screen and stage productions, which in turn has won him various awards.

In an interesting conversation with Jörgen Lundmark, Gulgowski talks about his life. He explains that his father was a piano tuner in Poland. His sister was to become a pianist, but the tunes she was taught, Wlodek picked out himself, just from listening. The parents found out that he had an absolute pitch, and sent him to study music at the age of four and a half.
He says that he identified heavily with Chopin in those days, but he was drawn also to jazz. He especially appreciated John Coltrane and Bill Evans. Gulgowski makes the interesting and telling remark that he already at the age of about 17 was looking for connections between styles. He says that he found out that stylistic expressions of Bill Evans are paralleled in, for example, Debussy and Ravel.
In connection with this I recall that Maestro Friedrich Gulda also could switch right off from performing Chopin to playing some jazz piece; he loved doing that… and there are many other parallels. Just think of Stravinskij and some of his compositions inspired by jazz and ragtime.
Gulgowski also make the observation that jazz music, when it was forbidden in Poland, was much more interesting and compelling for young people than had it been allowed and embraced by the state.
I have to comment here that this was the case also for other forms of art in the old Soviet sphere. Just consider the forbidden poems and novels being passed from hand to hand in dark basements. Those words of the poets and the writers were treasured, almost holy. This hardly happens with the word in so-called democratic states. If only this sense of holiness of the word and of the note could be retained in freedom, much would be won, much would be different in our world.

Gulgowski says that he was quite restrained when it came to influences from modern composers when he was young. Prokofiev was a role model, but he did not understand any of what Shostakovich wrote. However, later Dmitry Shostakovich has become an extremely important corner stone of Gulgowski’s musical history, moving from a romantic tonal expression to dodecaphony, especially apparent in his 15ht Symphony.

The summer months in Norway with Lutoslawski in the 1980s were important to Gulgowski. He also later visited the Maestro in Poland.
When Gulgowski explains how he realized, through his association with Lutoslawski, that even those larger-than-life legends, like Lutoslawski, in reality first of all are common human beings with all the pros and cons of such beings, I can make the exact same observation, deduced from my own association with Karlheinz Stockhausen, with whom I’ve worked as a photographer and a writer for some years, especially intensely at the Stockhausen Courses in Kürten, outside Cologne in Germany, for two weeks each summer.
This understanding, which cannot be reached purely intellectually, produces an even stronger affection for the person behind the legend, and for the achievements of that person.

When talking about his own compositional act, Wlodek Gulgowski says that he has not left all tradition behind. He has not shaped anything completely new or different, but has simply added on to already existing venues of music.
Here I must insert, though, that Gulgowski’s music comes across as very fresh and new, in its intensity of expression even in slower or more silent sections, and the freshness and newness, then, that I enjoy, perhaps stems from the composer’s own personality, through which all tradition, all influences, are filtered before reaching the score.

It is also important to note that Gulgowski maintains that he has no obvious inspirational influences that he can pinpoint. He admits that Lutoslawski has had a special place in his mind, but he also explains that there is no natural connection to jazz in Lutoslawski’s oeuvre. Gulgowski says, that behind all these styles, these genres, lies a universal music, beyond oneself. He says that his tonal expression is a vision that he tries to materialize in music.
Interestingly, this universal music is something that also Stockhausen talks about; this music of the spheres, these good and benevolent vibrations through space, through our spirits.

Wlodek Gulgowski expresses his wish to extend the concept of new polyphony with the concept new tonality, which he believes more accurately describes the subjective properties of his music. He means that the concept new tonality is equal to a development of tonality, atonality, modality and dodecaphony that he would also call intuitive tonality.

In the booklet, which really is bursting with information, Gulgowski gives quite precise introductions to his pieces. For the first piece – Toccata –, which I’ve already given a few of my own comments, he has, among other things, this to say:

"[Toccata is] a rhythmic composition that gives priority to a scaled-down motive that constantly reappears. A group of 16 8th notes – 5 + 5 + 3 + 3 – are distributed over two-measure periods".

This is how exact his commentary is. It keeps up like that. However, at the end of his Toccata commentary he assures:

"When I compose, I do not work with computations like Ligeti or Lutoslawski. Instead it is the music that steers everything […]. No pattern is so important that it cannot be immediately broken. The system is subordinate".

It is no aim of mine to constantly make comparisons to Stockhausen, but here is yet another interesting analogy between the two composers, in their attitude. A few times I’ve heard attendants at the Stockhausen Courses ask Stockhausen, at the seminars or the discussions immediately following the seminars each day, about certain details that the – often overly musicologically inclined – seminar attendants have discovered do not comply to the rules that Stockhausen himself has determined for the composition that is analyzed at the seminar. Often the attendants think they have discovered a mistake that Stockhausen, unknowingly, has made in the score or in his compositional work. Stockhausen, though, with a sardonic smile, just tells them right off that he thought it sounded better the other way, so he broke his rules. That’s that; no beating around the bush. The rules are broken at will! Isn’t that a relief, huh?

The second track is Intermezzo.
Carefully treading around the corner, down a staircase, across a floor, but then joyfully running over to the window, looking out; a doll in a tale, granted life for a night, moving about a house where the humans are asleep; this is my fantasy or vision at the beginning of this beautifully varied piece. Some denser, more powerful sections indicate a serious and proud tin soldier, who wants to impress the doll, who smiles shyly and hides her face behind her hand, then looks again, becomes less bashful and finally joins the tin soldier in a dance across the keyboard of the piano.
There is a lot of classical playing in here, again paired with a modern attitude. Fascinating.

Gulgowski talks about his piece in terms of a desire to lighten up the atmospheres with a more variable rhythm, but also with a larger sonorous variation.

When talking about the next work – Quasi Boogie – the composer states that it’s a piece wherein his opinions of the relationship between jazz and classical music are made clear. He explains that the heavy rhythm gave the title, and that he enjoys creating rhythmically complex contexts. It is interesting to note that Conlon Nancarrow comes up in Gulgowski’s short analysis of his own work. The composer states that his method in Quasi Boogie might be compared to Nancarrow’s use of two or three parallel tempi in the same work. [Of course, Nancarrow used many more parallel tempi at times, in his Studies for Player Piano].
An inside view of Gulgowski’s compositional thinking is given at the end of the analysis, where he says that he, at the end of this work, lets the relationship between left and right hand break apart rhythmically in a flow that lacks the steadiness of a boogie woogie. He indicates this breaking down of left-right relationships as an important character of his compositional methods.

Indeed the commencing bars connect you to Nancarrow, and maybe also too Pierre Boulez’s Sonates pour piano, when listening on the surface, as the tones glide and bump by under your gaze, reflecting the light of your perception, which can only arrive out of your frames of reference. What I’m saying – but this is true of all artistic perception, all kinds of listening – is that you hear what you are, or better, where you are; where you are on the journey of your experiences. The interesting and compelling thing about the music of Wlodek Gulgowski is that it offers so many starting points for your perceptual associations and references. It is a very rich music, artistically, pianistically and emotionally.

The mazurkas at tracks 4, 5 and 6 are a story unto themselves.
Gulgowski stresses the kinship between the Polish form mazurka and the Swedish hambo. The composer indicates that he immediately breaks the rules of the mazurka by letting go of the homogenous rhythm in both hands, allotting 124 beats per minute to the right hand and only about 82 to the left hand. His term is compound counterpoint, which, he explains, however intersects at different meeting points. He also lets the rhythm move from hand to hand, shifting its left-right identity.

When listening I get the impression of mazurkas in a distorting sonic mirror, but not quite that dramatic, not quite that off. It’s simply the feeling that something is strangely new or wrong or malfunctioning, vis-à-vis the traditional mazurka-hambo! The perspective of the tradition is slightly wringed, slightly twisted out of position, moving in a jerky shadow of the original mazurka style. It is very… lustful, enjoyable – and enormously musically rewarding, like jumping ice floes or dancing up across the famous silhouette of Tolpagorni (a mountaineer’s adventure) in the Kebnekaise massif in Swedish Lapland.

At track 7 we hear the work Illusion I.
Gulgowski lets on that he had no special plan for this piece. It rose, by virtue of the sonorities of the instrument itself, uncalled for, out of the piano. He also states, ominously, that the music does nor refer to neither Steve Reich (why Reich???) or Morton Feldman, so let’s listen for ourselves, then! Just the naming of those composers of course attunes our attention in a special way.

Instead of Reich or Feldman, I hear… Arvo Pärt! Yes, quite strongly, quite evidently. Presumably Gulgowski hasn’t quite made this very obvious connection. The sonorities are very much in agreement with some of the more brittle, austere compositions by Pärt, like Für Alina or Spiegel im Spiegel. They are definitely children of the same intuitive appeasement, the same spiritual, soaring coming-to-terms-with… Yes, beautiful it is!
The music is exceedingly introspective, loosing itself in a spiral drift inwards… as the mist slowly hovers by the edge of the forest, where the meadow with the brown, warm shapes of gracing cattle opens to the light of day…

Illusion II (track 11) stems from the beginning of the period of the composition of the pieces presented here; a five-year period. Illusion II, in turn, rose out of the concluding part of that period.

Gulgowski points out that timbre remains central, but perhaps more threatening, and without much melodic character. He says that the high registers are piercing, while the bass rumbles; two dramatic gestalts that oppose each other, but maybe later meet…

The striking difference to me, at the outset, is the more generous use of pauses, intermissions, and the more disturbing, banging chordal insertions. It seems more violent, more… disturbed, and not at all in line with the peaceful sense of introspection and acceptance of Illusion I. Here we have a lurking uproar, the smashing of storefront windows, the rage that lifts the stone… but still in an artistically controlled - or at least artistically outlined – progression of piano expressions.
This piece is very much more modern per se, than anything else I’ve heard on this CD, and that has both pros and cons, naturally. This makes it less individual, less original, I’d say, than the other works I’ve listened to, but not less enjoyable, I’d better insert, not to be misinterpreted!

The Sonata for Piano is placed at tracks 8 – 10.
Gulgowski, in his booklet introduction, talks about something fragmented falling apart, the theme not at all obvious. The small chaotic elements, he says, are neither ordered in a random fashion nor completely unpredictable.

Well, I think here, in a statement like this, lies some of the secrets behind the atmospheres of Wlodek Gulgowski’s music; this is his specific nature, here we detect his very own characteristics.
Gulgowski explains that Niklas Sivelöv, when playing, had expected the piece to settle, to flow – but it doesn’t!
The allegro of the first movement of the Sonata, however, presents a context, played with virtuosity.

The second movement gets into a romantic environment, musically, with a small theme, which is varied. Rhythmic characteristics are decipherable towards the end, in a prelude to the final movement.
Gulgowski determines that all is united and cemented in the last movement of the sonata. Themes from before recur in the small format. Rhythmic ideas from earlier on are developed further. A new theme is appearing, and, says the composer, the music is characterized by a myriad of events in a bright music that never gives up.

Sudden blocks of piano – like cubes of ice – tumble forth as the composition unfolds, even demonstrating some John Cage expressions, but only in a faint shadow play, because the impression isn’t Cageian for long, but perhaps leaning more towards a modern jigsaw impressionism, light reflecting off of tenement windows that swing in the wind at noon in a small Swedish town… Later a stern locomotive rhythm propels the music down the rail in fearless might, through tunnels, across bridges; spacious views of mountainsides and fertile valleys opening in dizzying perspectives all around, in the feeling of the passage between the south and north summit of Kebnekaise, precipitous depths opening left and right… gravity counteracted by diligent will and the walking of the fragility of line…

As the second movement slowly swirls in gravitational gestures across the stage, one leans back in the armchair – or the airchair? – and seeps absentmindedly some cool and alcoholic beverage, the chordal beauty rising like a Macintosh screensaver of the 1990s, colored spheres of piano tones slowly filling the available space, until you swim and bathe in a sea of spheres, almost like a child playing in the sea of rubber balls at MacDonald’s… but this music brings on a very peaceful and romantic, reflecting serenity amongst all those colored and light spheres of piano chords…

The third and final movement of the Piano Sonata is very rhythmic, fast, rolling past like a heavily armored car, full of might and power and force, guys in it hanging out, banging the side of the vehicle, yelling, boasting, a bit drunk.
This is a rock n’ rolling piece of art music, which in its medio slows down into staircases up and down, mystically spiraling through the layers of consciousness, until let loose in a state of enlightenment, from which the wrangling serpentines of piano chords can be watched as the mountain roads of Norway…

Gulgowski likens Harlequin at track 12 to a commedia dell’arte figure changing shape, moving back and forth between irony and seriousness, perhaps between serious irony and ironic seriousness?

A hesitant tripping opens the piece, immediately spinning a tangling thread of yarn pianism, which a kitten plays with, standing on his two hind legs, trying to catch the dangling thread with its front paws…
Insisting fingerings, tapping one single key over and over, is relieved by falling and rising motions in fast chordal spurs, again followed by single key repetitions, eventually slowing down into cautious rests, with gazes all around, trying to find out exactly from what angle the next attack may come, or, in the case of the kitten, where the desired object, a wounded fly, maybe, may be hiding, pulling itself pitifully across the table, behind some flower pots, the kitten’s attention revealed by the angulations of its attentive ears…

Reflection, at track 13, says Gulgowski, refers to the reflections of one’s thoughts, or of the fragility of life.
It’s a curiously chorded piece, initially, and silent, Feldmanesque… or maybe Melnykean… but mostly Gulgowskiean…
It’s dark, withheld, cautious… assembling a gradual density, which grows into an intermittent rumbling.
Thin, dispersed notes trickle like isolated drops of dew from the branches of spruce trees in a Scandinavian forest of October, the environment incredibly silent, the drops like crystal through timelessness…

Romance at track 14 is, according to the composer, a story of the light and darkness of love.
A shimmering Satie atmosphere in a misty tenderness also have me associate to the peculiar and wonderful Das Leben Chopins und andere Ton-Dichtungen by Gerhard Rühm; some of the most compelling and translucent, spellbinding piano works of any time. Those are extended works, while Wlodek Gulgowski’s piece at hand is very short. In this brief time span, though, Gulgowski manages to evoke these magic spirits of contentment of the sonorities that propel Rühm’s works well beyond the horizon of events. I could dwell in this lofty atmosphere for days and weeks…

Finally, at track 15, we find a piece called Fantasia du Jazz.
This is the very first piece composed during the period of this project, and thus saved for last, by Mr. Gulgowski’s whim, or through his intuition, or… by chance?
He says this piece is filled with reminiscences of his musical life, but they have welled up like the water of a forest well, not consciously organized; just received.
It appears, from reading Gulgowski’s text, that this piece is a bit autobiographical, describing the composer and his will not to stay with the same always, but to move forward.

There are hints at jazz in certain formulations, and meandering gestures of laced pianism, the thin smoke rising above the shining black surface of a grand piano in a bar in New York after hours, everyone but the pianist gone home, dawn slowly getting lighter outside in the alley: a gray morning shuddering over garbage cans and parked cars…

Only a master of pianistic composition could achieve the perfection and artistic diligence of this collection, and of course only a master of the art of piano playing could interpret it justly. Niklas Sivelöv surpasses himself in these fantastic recordings. The sheer quality of recorded sound also helps make this one of the prime recordings of the year.