Poles together
The Panufnik family It was in 1954, the year of his 40th birthday, that Andrzej Panufnik finally lost his patience with the Polish authorities and decided to defect, giving his country’s secret police the slip while abroad in Zurich and flying to London. Given asylum, he initially struggled to establish himself in his new homeland – especially compared to the celebrity he had enjoyed in Poland – but eventually the tide turned, not least when he won the Prince Rainier Competition in 1963. In England, too, he met the photographer Camilla Jessel (pictured with Panufnik in London, 1954, below), who would become his second wife. Roxanna Panufnik was born in 1968, and Jeremy (‘Jem’) Panufnik the following year. While Roxanna today forges her own career as a composer, Jem has enjoyed similar success as an artist and producer and, under the alter ego Jem Stone, DJ and founder of the Finger Lickin’ Records label. Andrzej Panufnik enjoyed his first BBC Proms appearance as a composer in 1955, when the BBC Symphony Orchestra performed his Sinfonia rustica; Roxanna’s Proms debut, meanwhile, came in 2014, when Valery Gergiev conducted the World Orchestra for Peace in her Three Paths to Peace.