Inauguration of Panufnik’s Year at the Barbican Centre
The concert of The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), conducted by Michael Francisa inaugurated at London’s Barbican Centrein the year of Andrzej Panufnik, London 2014, photo: Konrad Ćwik
The musical year of Andrzej Panufnik was inaugurated in London’s Barbican Centre on the 5th February, 2014. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the composer and conductor. Culture.pl is a co-organizer of celebrations commemorating this event.
The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), conducted by Michael Francis, performed two of the composer’s pieces during Wednesday’s inauguration: Symphony No. 3 (Sinfonia Sacra) from 1963, written on the occasion of the millennium of Christianity in Poland, and Lullaby from 1947, played on 29 stringed instruments and two harps.
Born in 1914, the composer had lived through almost all of the political storms of the 20th century and in the end of his life he managed to see Poland as a free country. -said the artist’s widow, Lady Camilla Panufnik, at the meeting before the concert.
Camilla Panufnik also drew attention to the fact that Sinfonia Sacra, performed in Poland for the first time in 1979 at the Warsaw Autumn music festival, is an expression of the composer’s opposition to the political system forced on Poland by the Soviet Union, which he hated. The state of his fury is reflected in the third fragment of the first part of the piece. – she pointed out.
The Barbican's director, Kathryn McDowell, recalled that Panufnik worked with the London Symphony Orchestra, which commissioned three of his pieces and performed his compositions. The LSO also annually organizes Panufnik music workshops for young composers.
British critics about the inauguration
Gavin Dixon, who lives in London, is a musicologist and music journalist associated with magazines such as Gramophone, Classical Music, Limelight, BBC Music Magazine. After the concert at the Barbican Centre, he wrote on his blog:
The LSO made a great start yesterday evening, with a concert featuring two works from opposite ends of the Panufnik spectrum: the Sinfonia Sacra, a bold statement of defiance against Poland’s Communist rule, and Lullaby, a quirky little microtonal number with some surprising twists. The event, and indeed the entire centenary, is being promoted by Poland’s Adam Mickiewicz Institute (…) He’s a composer well worth getting to know better, and 2014 is shaping up to be the ideal year to do so.
The Financial Times published the commentary of Richard Fairman, in which the critic writes about potential changes in Panufnik's music is received after the celebration of the composer’s year:
The Sinfonia Sacra, probably his best-known work, is typically clear-headed and direct. Four solo trumpets at the corners of the stage announce the start with a volley of fanfares. A medieval Polish chant inspires music of hallowed simplicity, interrupted by a short, sharp movement of violent rhythmic energy, and then the final hymn builds to a glowing climax, crowned again by the four trumpets. In the mid-1960s it is easy to imagine how this seemed too obvious, too easy on the ear. But we have lived through the minimalists since then, including the Polish Górecki, and perhaps it is time to revisit Panufnik.
His Lullaby (1947, revised 1955) now seems a decade or two ahead of its time. The piece asks 29 solo string players to commune softly at different speeds, some of them with quarter-tones. The result is like an angel on some wheezy old accordion, softly breathing its ragged notes in and out – numinous Górecki blended with Ligeti- like clouds of sound, wistful and charming.
Panufnik Year – concerts and publications
Andrzej Panufnik, 1987., photo: Camilla Jessel / Boosey & Hawkes Collection / Forum
Events celebrating Panufnik's year will take place across the globe. These include -
Italian conductor, Renato Rivolta, with the Polish National Radio SymphonyOrchestra, performed the Tragic Overture and Polonia in Warsaw on February 8th. In May, the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra will play the Heroic Overture and Panufnik’s Piano Concerto.
At the end of February, the Liverpool Symphony Orchestra will perform the Panufnik violin concerto.
On October 18th, the artistic director of the Royal Opera House in London, Antonio Pappano, and the LSO will perform Panufnik's Symphony no. 10 in Katowice, a city in the south of Poland, to inaugurate the new concert hall named after the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.
On 30th November, the cultural centre of Kings Place will organize a concert of Panufnik’s chamber music and an exhibition of photographs taken by his wife.
The music label CPO will release Panufnik pieces on eight discs. Another label, Signum, will release the album Dreamscape with songs by Panufnik and his daughter Roxana's piano trio, while Heritage Label will provide a historical recording of the Bassoon and Orchestra Concertos from 1980.
Toccata Press will publish the composer’s autobiography, Composing Oneself, with a post scriptum written by the Panufnik’s widow.
The concert of The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), conducted by Michael Francisa inaugurated at London’s Barbican Centrein the year of Andrzej Panufnik, London 2014, photo: Konrad Ćwik
All Andrzej Panufnik pieces will be digitized and made available for free on the internet. This is not the first time a Polish composer's entire work has been made available online - a similar portal was launched in 2013 for the anniversaries of three famous Polish composers: Witold Lutosławski, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki and Krzysztof Penderecki (http://threecomposers.pl/),
Panufnik concerts also planned in Germany, the USA and Brazil
I hope the effect of these musical events will be that Panufnik’s music will be constantly present in the repertoire of orchestras all over the world, not only due to the anniversaries - said Ewa Bogusz–Moore of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Panufnik, born in Warsaw, was a son of a violinist mother and an violin-maker father. He graduated from the Warsaw Music Conservatory in 1939. During the occupation he was in Warsaw composing and taking part in legal and illegal concerts as a pianist. His compositions were burned during the Warsaw Uprising, including two symphonies.
Panufnik fled from Poland in 1954. “He paid a high price for being ahead of the time in which he lived” – wrote Nigel Osbourne, the British composer and music lecturer, who studied in Poland in the 60s. Osbourne marks that even in England, despite the country’s openness towards new artistic trends, Panufnik was perceived for many years as old-fashioned creator. He names him as an introvert, but a warm and passionate man.
The artist visited Poland after 36 years of absence in 1990, shortly before his death in 1991.
Source: PAP, culture.pl, ed. AG, 6.02.2014, translated: Katarzyna Maksimiuk, 10.02.2014
