Goethe's phrase ''Ich bin ruhig''—I am calm—sits with some irony in a work by Tadeusz Baird, whose music rarely escapes restlessness and melancholy and who is revealed by this disc to be a modernist haunted by echoes of late romanticism.
Though younger than Lutoslawski—he lived from 1928 to 1981—Baird had much more difficulty in making a positive advance into musical progressiveness. The earliest work here, Scene for cello, harp and orchestra (1966–7) is an exercise in stop-go, its promising initiatives in post-Bergian expressiveness withering away in improvisatory rambling. The cantata setting extracts from Goethe's letters (1970) offers a comparable contrast between the unconvincing (in this case the use of speech and speech-song) and an appealing melodic eloquence which reaches back to Mahler.
The two late works, both dated 1981, continue the contrast. Canzona might be thought to follow a programme—Affirmation Denied—of overt political significance, moving from episodic early stages to a tough climax in which a quasi-chorale peters out just when it seems to be gathering its energies for a happy ending. Best of all is Voices from Afar, settings of Polish poems (though the booklet gives only German and English) whose mood of simple regret inspires an austere elegy of considerable beauty. Here, at last, Baird's habitual restlessness is overcome.
It is Voices, too, which has the most polished performance and the best recording. Of the other works, Scene suffers most from an artificially boosted sound which places the harp in threatening close-up.'