Word: penderecki
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...worst moments seem to fascinate Poland's avant-garde composer Krzysztof Penderecki. In his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, Dies Irae (an oratorio in memory of the dead of Auschwitz) and The Passion and Death of Jesus Christ According to St. Luke, Penderecki treated mass annihilation and murder with moving intensity, stretching the limits of orchestral and vocal range so far that he had to invent new notational symbols for his score (TIME, Oct. 14, 1966). Thus it was only appropriate that for his first opera he chose as his subject a tale of mass hysteria and political...
Hell on Earth. Penderecki based The Devils of Loudun on both Aldous Huxley's historical essay and John Whiting's play The Devils. The libretto sketches the facts surrounding the torture and execution of a Jesuit priest in a 17th century French provincial town. Sister Jeanne of the Angels, prioress of St. Ursula's Convent, asks Father Urbain Grandier (sung by Baritone Andre Hiolski) to become the cloister's confessor. When the worldly, sensual priest declines the offer, Sister Jeanne has a series of hysterical sexual hallucinations that soon infect other nuns in the convent. Eventually...
...released in the fall are Philadelphia versions of the Mahler First Symphony and Mendelssohn's Elijah. After that will come DeFalla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain with Rubinstein, Mahler's Second Symphony, Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and several contemporary works, including Krzystof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima...
...standards, even Stravinsky and Bartok are somewhat old hat. "The tradition that I am upholding is the tradition of the continuance of music," he says. He has introduced new works by Milton Babbitt and Krzysztof Penderecki to the U.S., revived neglected ones by Charles Ives and Ferruccio Busoni. Zukofsky's 1968 recording of Roger Sessions' Violin Concerto proved that the music was not only playable, which many a violinist had denied, but that it was perhaps the finest concerto for the instrument ever produced by an American composer...
Even the creators of new music that points firmly away from Bach cannot escape him. He is too deeply embedded in the curriculum of music conservatories, and he towers too imposingly as an unrivaled craftsman. Polish Composer Krzysztof Penderecki, 35, acknowledges the continuity between Bach and his own St. Luke Passion (1966) by spelling out the master's name in a recurring cantus firmus: B flat, A, C, H (the German notation for B natural). Used by Bach himself in The Art of Fugue, the motif is a traditional tribute that has been paid by composers as diverse...