The Silesian Quartet sprang to international attention with it's award-winning recordings of chamber music by Grazyna Bacewicz. It's latest project - the complete quartets of Penderecki - was started in 2012, but not completed until January 2021. Presented chronologically, the works on the album take us on a journey from Penderecki's early avant-garde 'sonoristic' style of the 1960s - the first and second quartets - to the later neo-romantic style of the third and fourth quartets, composed in 2008 and 2016 respectively. Of all Penderecki's output, the Quartet for Clarinet and String Trio shows the strongest links to the chamber music of the nineteenth century. Penderecki was inspired to write the piece by the 1992 recording by the Emerson String Quartet and Mstislav Rostropovich of Schubert's String Quintet in C major, D 956. Here the Silesian Quartet is joined by the clarinetist Piotr Szymyslik.

It is the spring of 1937. Musical circles in Warsaw are still abuzz with talk of the recently concluded 3 rd Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, especially as one of the main prizes that year has gone to Witold Małcużyński, an alumnus of Józef Turczyński’s class at the Warsaw Conservatoire. Alongside Małcużyński, Józef Turczyński has spent the last four years nurturing another promising student, an 18-year-old called Weinberg (Polish: Wajnberg). Known as Moses in his official papers, he is nowadays more keen to go by the name of Mieczysław. It was this name he had used when he put his name to two mazurkas penned in 1933 and dedicated to “Professor Józef Turczyński”. Following the mazurkas, Mietek – the diminutive form of this typically Polish name that years later he would insist that others call him by – composed three more miniatures for violin and piano, and another small piece for solo piano. And now, in 1937, he has decided to compose a string quartet, that is a multi-movement piece for a larger line-up.