Krzysztof Penderecki

In the 1960s, Krzysztof Penderecki explored orchestral texture in Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, Polymorphia, and the St Luke Passion, which carried that language into sacred music. He was born in Dębica in 1933, studied at the State Higher School of Music in Kraków and joined its faculty on graduating. From the 1970s the writing opened outwards, admitting long melodic gesture, historical forms and an audible debt to the Romantic tradition. Symphonies, concertos, operas, chamber music and large sacred works followed, the Polish Requiem among them, assembled over decades as Polish history gave him occasions for its movements. He conducted widely with major orchestras across Europe, America and Asia, including his own music. He died in 2020. Strophes, heard at the Warsaw Festival of Contemporary Music in 1959, first drew notice to him, and Anaklasis followed a year later. The stage works run from The Devils of Loudun, composed in 1968–69, through Paradise Lost in 1978 to the comedy Ubu Rex of the early 1990s, while the Second Cello Concerto brought him a Grammy at the 1988 awards. In 2004 the Japan Art Association gave him its Praemium Imperiale for music.