Andrzej Panufnik

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

The biography of Andrzej Panufnik (1914-1991) is one of the most extraordinary in twentieth-century music, and one of the least told. During the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, he formed a piano duo with Witold Lutoslawski and performed in cafés - the only legal venue for Polish music - while composing Songs of Underground Resistance. His manuscripts from the occupation years were destroyed in 1944 when he fled Warsaw just before the Uprising; he later reconstructed several works from memory. After the war he rebuilt the Warsaw Philharmonic, became one of Poland's leading composers, and then, in 1954, defected to the United Kingdom during a recording trip to Switzerland. His name was banned in Poland until 1977. He visited his homeland only in 1990.

In exile in Twickenham, working without institutional support and treated with suspicion by the British musical establishment for years, Panufnik developed a compositional method grounded in geometric structure: small cells of two or three notes arranged in patterns of symmetry and proportion, the architecture of a work derived from mathematical relationships rather than harmonic convention. Universal Prayer (1968-69) is one of the most fully realized expressions of this method. Scored for four solo voices, three harps, organ, and mixed chorus, it sets Alexander Pope's 18th-century poem of the same name - a text Panufnik chose partly because Pope had also lived in Twickenham. The entire work is derived from a single triad, used vertically and horizontally with its reflections and transpositions, the technical discipline entirely subservient, in Panufnik's own account, to the spiritual and emotional requirements of the text. It premiered in May 1970 at the Church of St. John the Divine in New York under Leopold Stokowski, and was first performed in Poland at the 1977 Warsaw Autumn. Original Unicorn pressing.