My Saturday July 16, 2011 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com feature on Krzysztof Penderecki, appearing at Grant Park.
Poland’s Krzysztof Penderecki keeps eyes on past, present, future
Renowned composer-conductor brings his music, Beethoven's to Grant Park this weekend
BY ANDREW PATNER
Concert repeats Saturday at 7:30 p.m.
Composer-conductor Krzysztof Penderecki backstage at the Pritzker Pavilion. | Jean Lachat~Sun-Times
‘So much of what a Polish artist has done reflects the unique conditions of the Polish people and Polish history.”
Though he is talking about a history that contains, in his own lifetime and memory, the modern partition and remapping of his country, World War II, the Holocaust, the deaths of millions of his countrymen, an imposed communist dictatorship, the Solidarity uprising, martial law, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a rough-and-tumble contemporary democracy, Krzysztof Penderecki shares this observation in a quiet, almost avuncular way.
“Music is a response to its time -- the time of the composer’s own life and the time around him.”
At 77, the bearded, gentle-eyed Penderecki is his nation’s most revered and accomplished composer with a career of international successes stretching back half a century. And he is always conscious of the past and future as well as the present. In Chicago to lead concerts this weekend at the Grant Park Music Festival, he is thinking about Beethoven -- whose Third Symphony, the Eroica, closes his program -- his own work for three cellos and orchestra from 2000, as well as new pieces he is composing.
As with many composers and conductors, Penderecki sees Beethoven as a universal standard.
“There is no one else in music who creates and recreates anew each time like Beethoven,” he says. “No one else wrote nine symphonies -- nine! -- where each of them is new and different.”
His own new works are also always on his agenda. “Throughout my life, I have always planned projects for 10 years ahead of me,” he says. “I always have something to do.”
Right now, he is working on “several” solo concertos (“There are examples: Paganini wrote 200 or so for violin!”) and a new opera, his fifth, based on the ancient Greek story of Phaedra and her independence as a lover.
His career as a conductor, not only of his own music but of other large-scale symphonic works from Beethoven to Shostakovich, also keeps him before world audiences “as often as 50 engagements a year,” he chuckles, as if he himself is not sure how he keeps up such a pace.
Born in 1933 in the southern Polish town of Debica, also known as Dembitz by its historic Jewish population, destroyed by the Nazis when Penderecki was a boy, he has composed across a wide array of genres and styles beginning during his studies in Krakow. His early works were both major contributions to the avant-garde and hard-hitting responses to world events, including Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima of 1960, and his 1967 take on the Dies Irae prayer, a memorial to those murdered at Auschwitz. (“Remember that Auschwitz is only 30 miles from Krakow" he observes.) His operas, from The Devils of Loudun in 1969 to the Lyric Opera of Chicago commission Paradise Lost (1975-78) to musical translations of the theatre of the absurd, The Black Mask (1984-86) and Ubu Roi (1991), are reminders of his strong literary sensibility and love of written texts.
Meanwhile, his instrumental music in recent years, such as the Concerto Grosso No. 1 being heard at Grant Park, has been increasingly tonal, melodic, and inspired by earlier classical musical styles.
When asked in conversation in the Pritzker’s sunlit backstage Choral Room to characterize his broad range of styles and focus, he at first replies with a wry smile, “chaotic.” But then he adds: “My music comes from me and has to be written to give me pleasure. In any other [field of the arts], an avant-garde lasts for three or four years and then is replaced by the next avant-garde. Only in postwar modern music did an avant-garde last for three, four decades. I was beyond it. I was not part of a group. Other music was coming out from me. I had been a violinist; this had an effect on what interested me. I lived in history. This had an effect. I was interested in setting sacred and literary texts. This was different.”
Conducting also came to fill more of his schedule, including with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2000 in his own choral Symphony No. 7, Seven Gates of Jerusalem, and Schubert’s Symphony No. 5. The CSO actually presented his three-cello concerto this past season with three of its leading members taking the solo parts under Charles Dutoit. “Grant Park is an excellent orchestra, too,” Penderecki says. “We were really able to just play the Beethoven straight through in rehearsal. We understood each other very quickly.”
And what of his Paradise Lost, based on John Milton’s epic poem, having had its world première at Lyric in 1978 when the company was in difficult financial straits? Penderecki is philosophical. “This is what happened,” he says. “But it had a life elsewhere: It went to La Scala, to the Vatican.”
Would he like to see it done again in Chicago or elsewhere in the States? Could Paradise be revived?
“Regained,” he laughs, referring to yet another Milton poem.
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