Krzysztof Penderecki

condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (light wear)

Five works from a single, unrepeatable explosion. Between 1958 and 1962, Krzysztof Penderecki became, more or less overnight, the most radical figure in Polish music and one of the most arresting voices in the post-war European avant-garde. This LP - recorded in Warsaw in 1965 and issued by Wergo in their Studio Reihe Neuer Musik series alongside landmark early documents of Lutosławski and Ligeti - presents the arc of that explosion and its immediate aftermath.

Psalmen Davids (1958) for chorus and percussion was his debut at the Warsaw Autumn Festival. Anaklasis (1959-60) for strings and percussion - the work that first brought him to international attention at the Donaueschingen Festival in 1960 - deploys orchestral sonority as a single mass of sound subject to pressure and deformation rather than as a collection of independent voices. Sonate für Cello und Orchester (1964), with Siegfried Palm as soloist, threads a lyric thread through the surrounding dense orchestral textures. Fluorescences (1961-62) is the culmination and the limit point: a massive orchestral work Penderecki himself later described as "a decadent piece, destroying really the classical orchestra," after which he knew there was no way to continue in the same direction. And Stabat Mater (1962) for three a cappella choirs already traces the turn - toward early polyphony, toward the human voice as raw material, toward the sacred. The St. Luke Passion was next.

Conducted by Andrzej Markowski; Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus; Poznań Philharmonic for the Cello Sonata. Original Wergo gatefold pressing with 8-page booklet, liner notes in German.