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Product Description
This text contains four biographical portraits of leading Polish composers of the 20th century - Andrzej Panufnik (1914-91), Witold Lutoslawski (1913-94), Krzystof Penderecki (b.1933) and Henryk Gorecki (b.1933) - with contextual considerations of their work. Each composer has a different creative approach despite a common national background. Key elements in that background are Poland's folk and art music; the Roman Catholic tradition; and the sequence of political regimes - Nazi, Communist and post-Communist - by which all were affected. For Penderecki and Gorecki (being of a younger generation) the music of Panufnik and Lutoslawski is also part of their shared experience. Against the background of the varied musical styles practised in the latter half of the 20th century - serialism and its clever incidental results, and on the other, the use of chance procedures, the "new simplicity" and minimalism - the author dramatizes the position of these four composers, showing how each rises above the musical movements with which they are habitually linked. Their individual lives and careers are also compared and contrasted in a series of "interfaces", and show their contribution to the revival of modern Polish music. This text is part of the 20th-century composers series, examining composers in a biographical context, and offering a comprehensive study of key figures in the creation of 20th-century music. None of the books in the series presume a knowledge of specialized terms or musical notation. Each book in the series features a list of works, a bibliography, and a discography.
Amazon.com Review
The fall of Communism has brought many benefits (as well as some uncertainties) to the people who once wore that ideology's chains. Not the least of these benefits is the emergence of a group of composers from the former Eastern Bloc countries who write in musical languages informed by both Western art and Slavic roots. Andrzej Panufnik (1914-91), Witold Lutoslawski (1913-94), Krzystof Penderecki (born in 1933), and Henryk Gorecki (also born in 1933) wrote (or write) in very different styles, yet all four express their Polish background and reactions to the totalitarian regimes of Nazism and Communism. Of them, Henryk Gorecki has perhaps reached most successfully to find a universal idiom, a feat which has made him a better-known figure internationally than the others, but in the small world of Polish music, they all have heard and affected one another. Author Bernard Jacobson has had the advantage of working with Panufnik and interviewing the rest, and he brings authority to this well-written multiple biography.
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