PENDERECKI MASTERPIECES GO ON TOUR IN CHINA
Works by the renowned Polish composer will be performed in five cities from now till end of the month, Chen Nan reports.
In 1995, Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki finished his Violin Concerto No.2 Metamorphosen, 18 years after his Violin Concerto No.1.
Penderecki, who started working on the score in 1992, dedicated it to his friend, German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who premiered it later that year with the London Symphony Orchestra. The score was also featured in the album Penderecki: Violin Concerto No.2
Metamorphosen by German classical music record label Deutsche Grammophon in 1998. It also won two Grammy awards that year: Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (with orchestra) and Best Classical Contemporary Composition.
“Few composers have demonstrated so many different colors and contradictions through their compositions,” says the violinist Mutter in Beijing recently. “For me, this work is a physical and psychological challenge, which requires my best technical skills but yet give me tremendous musical fulfillment.”
To mark Penderecki’s 85th birthday, which falls on Nov 23, and in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Poland regaining its independence, Mutter played the Violin Concerto No.2 Metamorphosen alongside Sinfonia Varsovia Orchestra under the baton of Polish conductor Maciej Tworek at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing on Oct 17.
The performance also marked the start of the violinist’s China tour with the orchestra.
Penderecki, who was also in Beijing, will join the tour which includes Shanghai on Oct 21, Changsha, Hunan province, on Oct 23, Xiamen, Fujian province, on Oct 26 and Fuzhou, Fujian province, on Oct 28.
Penderecki will be conducting Sinfonia Varsovia Orchestra, performing Antonín Dvorak’s Symphony No.7.
“There is humanity in his music, not just techniques. His music makes us more human,” Mutter adds. “Playing his pieces brings much more meaning to my life.”
Besides Violin Concerto No.2 Metamorphosen, Mutter will also play Penderecki’s
La Follia for the solo violin during the ongoing China tour. She first premiered the piece in 2013 at the Carnegie Hall in New York.
Penderecki, who is hailed as “Poland’s greatest living composer” by The Guardian, recalls that he was impressed by Mutter’s performance decades ago when she was a 14-year-old performing Mozart’s
Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major under the baton of the late conductor Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. He has since been following the violinist’s concerts and composing music works for her.
Deutsche Grammophon released a double album titled Hommage à Penderecki this August which showcases several of Penderecki’s works for violin and piano or violin and orchestra. All of them feature the violinist Mutter.
Since his first visit to China more than 20 years ago, Penderecki has been visiting the country almost every year. In 2002, he was the conductor for the China Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra when they premiered his Symphony No. 3 at the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing. In 2016, he conducted the Beethoven Festival Orchestra at the Great Hall of the People in the Chinese capital.
“It has become a tradition for me to come to China. I have seen the audiences’ enthusiasm for music, which cannot be compared to any other country,” Penderecki says.
After studying composition under Franciszek Skołyszewski and later at the Kraków Academy of Music under Artur Malawski and Stanisław Wiechowicz, Penderecki composed Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima in 1959, which is one of his best-known compositions. In the past six decades, Penderecki has composed more than 100 instrumental works, including 20 chamber works, 17 solo works and seven symphonies.
Besides music, the composer is also interested in gardening.
Wray Armstrong, the chairman of Armstrong Music & Arts – it is the organizer of the ongoing China tour of Anne-Sophie Mutter and Sinfonia Varsovia – can attest to this. He notes that he once visited Penderecki’s home in Lusławice in southern Poland and was impressed by the garden the composer designed himself.
“There are over 1,800 species of trees in the garden and two labyrinths,” says Penderecki’s wife Elzbieta Penderecka in Beijing. “It’s one of the largest private collections in Central Europe.”
“I became involved in planting trees many years ago and this is my life and my love,” Penderecki says. “I like walking among the trees and looking at them growing. It’s the greatest joy in my life, even more than music.”