Marking a year since the death of the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute has launched a new virtual garden, inspired by the composer’s legacy. It allows visitors to explore Penderecki’s life and works through his love of plants. To visit the website, click here.
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Born in Dębica, in Poland, Penderecki is best known for works including Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, Symphony No. 3, his St Luke Passion, Polish Requiem, Anaklasis and Utrenja. His music is often described as vibrant, sensual, and terrifying and not everybody was a fan of his earlier output; some have said at first listen that it sounds like noise. But it is nothing if not innovative, often making use of extended technique such as as bowing beyond the bridge or kicking the body of a cello with heels.
Later in life, Penderecki rekindled his relationship with tradition, explaining his shift by saying (as quoted by Mieczyslaw Tomaszewski) that he had come to feel that the experimentation of the avant-garde had gone too far from the expressive, non-formal qualities of Western music: ‘The avant-garde gave one an illusion of universalism. The musical world of Stockhausen, Nono, Boulez and Cage was for us, the young – hemmed in by the aesthetics of socialist realism, then the official canon in our country – a liberation…I was quick to realise however, that this novelty, this experimentation, and formal speculation, is more destructive than constructive; I realised the Utopian quality of its Promethean tone’. Penderecki concluded that he was ‘saved from the avant-garde snare of formalism by a return to tradition.
To watch a trailer for the website, see below.