Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutoslawski, Tadeusz Baird

condition (records/cover): NM / NM

A Czechoslovak label's survey of three of the defining figures of postwar Polish composition - a document of how the Polish avant-garde looked from across the border at the moment of its greatest international reach. The Supraphon Contemporary series operated as a window onto new music from Warsaw in much the same way that Hungaroton's Contemporary Hungarian Music series documented Budapest: institutional and state-operated, but genuinely committed to presenting the music of a living generation.

Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutosławski, and Tadeusz Baird represent three distinct positions within Polish new music of the 1960s and early 1970s. Penderecki's sonoristic radicalism - tone clusters, extended string techniques, the graphic notation of the early orchestral works - had already made him internationally notorious before the St. Luke Passion gave him a wider public. Lutosławski had developed, through the 1960s, his mature language of "controlled aleatorism" - a precisely calibrated system in which performers improvise within fixed parameters, creating a texture that sounds like chance but is structurally determined at every level. Baird's voice was the most lyrical and in some ways the most elusive of the three: a chromaticism that remained in dialogue with Romantic tradition, a gift for sustained melodic writing that sat in complex relation to the more radical procedures around him.

Each of these positions had already been documented extensively by Muza and Polskie Nagrania; this Supraphon compilation offers a different kind of document - the same music heard from a neighboring country that was watching the Polish scene with sustained attention. Original 2LP pressing.