Maria Pomianowska Brings Her Magically Shapeshifting Polish String Sounds to the Lincoln Center Festival

Maria Pomianowska‘s axe is the Biłgoraj suka, a medieval Polish forerunner of today’s violin, which she’s responsible for literally reconstructing and rescuing from obscurity. Leading her chamber ensemble, she’s playing her own hauntingly eclectic, classical and folk-influenced repertoire for the instrument this Tuesday, July 25 at 8 PM at the Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center as part of this year’s the Lincoln Center Festival. Tix are steep – $35 – but this is a rare chance to see this magical Polish artist.

Pomianowska’s’s latest album – streaming at Bandcamp – is The Voice of Suka, an aptly titled series of pastoral themes. It’s sort of a wider-angle, more panoramic take on what Vivaldi did with the Four Seasons, although there’s surprisingly less wintriness here than in the chilly coda to the Italian composer’s suite. Maybe it’s natural for a Polish composer to wish for summer, and for an Italian to crave a little frost.

Pomianowska’s  Biłgoraj suka (named for its city of origin) has a ripe resonance enhanced by the natural reverb of the room where the album was recorded. The core of her period-instrument ensemble comprises Aleksandra Kauf on vocals, Bilgoraj suka and mielec suka; Iwona Rapacz on bass suka, and Patrycja Napierała on percussion. The album’s title track, Step has a steady pulse that also proves true to its title, a deceptively simple series of echo phrases from the strings over syncopated clip-clop percussion, with a windswept Nordic flavor. Wind, a breezy, lilting, baroque-tinged dance, is grounded by long, sustained, drony bass suka lines.

Rainbow begins as a lush. graceful waltz and then Pomianowska picks up the pace; it ends cold. By contrast, Ocean has a dancing bass suka vamp holding down a deeper, darker pulse, a bouncy one-chord groove with Pomianowska’s bouncy eighth notes and rustic melismas overhead. Valley is even darker, a melancholy, starkly memorable Slavic pavane for choir and strings, Pomianowska deftly building it to a baroque swirl. She echoes that later on in River, with its stern choral arrangement.

The album’s most intense, shapeshifting track, Island, bridges the gap between Middle Eastern and Celtic modes, from a steady Nordic pulse to a brooding waltz out. Pomianowska goes in the opposite direction with Fjord. its hazy summer ambience punctuated by incisively flickering suka lines, up to a somber stroll in the same vein as her earlier valley theme. Forest is more shady and shadowy than verdant as the ensemble waltzes resolutely with uneasy Balkan tinges.

Desert, the most mysterious track here, has an enigmatically catchy, Balkan-tinged melody and variations anchored by a dark, distantly boomy Middle Eastern daf drumbeat, up to a breathtaking trick ending. It makes a good good segue, and an even better parallel, with the slowly crescendoing, epic Monsoon, slowly rising with Indian tabla rhythm and similarly uneasy modal variations. The album closers somberly with a wistful song without words, Sluzytem Ja Tobie (I Brought This to You). This music will resonate with a lot of people: fans of classical and Hardanger fiddle music and also the moody folk sounds of the Balkans and further east.