Krzysztof Penderecki

condition (record/cover): NM / EX Gatefold sleeve.

Two works, one LP, one conductor: Krzysztof Penderecki at the podium of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1973. The pairing is programmatic in the most precise sense - Anaklasis (1960) and the Symphony No.1 (1973) mark the opening and closing of the avant-garde period, thirteen years apart, the composer conducting both ends of his own arc.

Anaklasis is where the international reputation was made: forty-two strings and percussion groups treated as a single resonating mass, the cluster-based language and graphic notation that announced a new way of writing for orchestra. The Symphony No.1 is where that language arrives at its largest and most architecturally sustained form - two movements, approximately thirty minutes, the full weight of a decade's worth of sonoristic thinking assembled into a structure that could reasonably be called symphonic without borrowing anything from the symphonic tradition. Critics at the time were uncertain what to do with it. The work had no precedent to lean against.

The LSO recording is the founding document of the symphony's discography - the premiere account with the orchestra that gave the work its first major Western airing, the composer at the podium, the collaboration that placed Penderecki at the centre of the international contemporary music scene at precisely the moment the neoclassical turn was about to begin. An original 1973 pressing.