Krzysztof Penderecki at 80

[gurnemanz]

When I was living in Germany about 40 years ago, someone recommended the St Luke Passion. I bought a double LP on a Polish label (still got it) – Henryk Czyz, Cracow Philharmonic Orchestra. I was bowled over and more recently I updated it with the superb Naxos version with Antoni Wit. However, it does remain the only music by him which I know.

[Richard Barrett]

Not even the Second Quartet and the Violin Concerto?

I'm not sure what the Second Quartet has to do with 18th and 19th century music, or how the Violin Concerto builds on Ligeti's earlier work (as opposed to recapitulating bits of it).

[richardfinegold]

When I was living in Germany about 40 years ago, someone recommended the St Luke Passion. I bought a double LP on a Polish label (still got it) – Henryk Czyz, Cracow Philharmonic Orchestra. I was bowled over and more recently I updated it with the superb Naxos version with Antoni Wit. However, it does remain the only music by him which I know.

Many years I ago I had lunch in Hong Kong with a very senior Naxos executive. He told me that KP's wife became jealous ofthe label's Lutoslawski series and that she personally bankrolled the Naxos KP series.

[Serial_Apologist]

This is a tough one, isn't it? Adherence to the faith leads to a greater and greater appeal to a smaller and smaller audience?

One can make a judgment in moral terms, and in economic terms. Sadly, the two seem to be pretty close to mutually exclusive. But the language most used in 'judgment' is usually a quasi-moral one - sell-out, betrayal of ideals, lack of commitment/courage, etc etc

Each time I just think of earlier composers sacrificed by Stalinism, fascism... and now, "the market".

[Richard Barrett]

Adherence to the faith

But that's such an oversimplified notion of what an artist's commitment actually consists of that it has very little meaning indeed. If Penderecki hadn't entered his retrogressive phase his music would in all likelihood not have acquired "a greater and greater appeal to a smaller and smaller audience", as we see from other composers around his age who, far from "adhering" to anything (as Penderecki's later music often does to a neo-expressionist style whose expressive range is certainly much restricted in comparison to the music he wrote previously), kept on expanding their horizons and those of their audiences: Xenakis, Berio, Stockhausen, Nono and others... it seems to me that there's a lot of music around on the level of competence and sincerity you hear in Penderecki's later work, but there isn't so much that achieves the startling inventiveness of something like his 1962 piece Fluorescences.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I'm not sure what the Second Quartet has to do with 18th and 19th century music, or how the Violin Concerto builds on Ligeti's earlier work (as opposed to recapitulating bits of it).

I've not made myself clear. I cited Ligeti as an example of a composer who made a successful corpus of work which built both on the "sonic/textural" pieces of the early '60s and came to a later conciliation thingummy with the Music of the 18th and 19th Centuries without compromising their discoveries and achievemnets of those early works (in just exactly the way that Penderecki doesn't). The Second String Quartet is already a step towards such a conciliation - the medium, the separate movements - from a work like Lontano. The Violin Concerto is an example of a work that marks the final stage in this process: there are clear Ligetian fingerprints (which over-enthusiastic ears might hear as "recapitulating bits of it") - simultaneous pulsings, explorations of registral extremes, micropolyphonic textures - but there's also a keener sense of microtonal acoustic tunings (he'd heard Grisey) than that present in the Second Quartet (for example), the genre (very different from the works of the '70s which have "Concerto" in their titles - closer to the 18th & 19th Century conception - but also different from it - five movements, a rethinking of what is an "orchestra") - and the use of the "modal" melody that caresses its way through the whole work: a "big tune" that owes nothing to the "bid tunes" of the Romantics - a reinvention of the "big tune" in that it's self-effacing, understated, insinuous. This builds from the language of the Horn Trio, but it's new: Ligeti rebooting his ideas about Music and what it can do.

[Richard Barrett]

Ligeti rebooting his ideas about Music and what it can do

I just don't take such an enthusiastic view of the later Ligeti, I find it a bit tired and perfunctory, but that's a matter of taste of course.