Krzysztof Penderecki

condition (records/cover): NM / EX

A Polish pressing from 1988, with the Cracow Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Wojciech Czepiel. Three works that trace almost thirty years of Penderecki's development: Anaklasis (1960) and the Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) from the moment of international breakthrough, and the Passacaglia and Rondo (1988) - composed in the same year as this recording, and eventually absorbed as movements into the Symphony No.3 (completed 1995).

The juxtaposition is pointed. Anaklasis - forty-two strings and percussion, premiered at Donaueschingen in 1960 - and the Threnody are the works that defined what Penderecki's name meant to a generation: string clusters, graphically notated noise-fields, a temporal architecture that owed nothing to received form. The Passacaglia and Rondo arrives from a different world entirely - the neo-Romantic Penderecki of the late 1980s, structurally disciplined in the manner of the Baroque forms it names, lyrical in a way the early works never were. On a single LP, the distance between 1960 and 1988 is audible as a complete stylistic transformation. Czepiel, who would later re-record this same program for Dux, was among the conductors who built a sustained relationship with Penderecki's music from the Kraków base. Original Arston pressing, 1988.