Seiji Ozawa And The Boston Symphony In Music By Handel, Panufnik And Schumann – 1982 – Past Daily Mid-Week Concert

Seiji Ozawa and The Boston Symphony – Music of Handel, Panufnik and Schumann – January 30, 1982 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –

Another historic concert this week – again featuring Seiji Ozawa leading the Boston Symphony. This time it’s a World Premier – Sinfonia Votiva by Andrzek Panufnik, including an interview with the composer just prior to the playing of the piece.

Opening the concert is Handel’s Concerto Grosso in D – followed by the Panufnik and ending the concert with Schumann’s Symphony Number 4.

A few words on Sir Andrzej Panufnik via his biography:

Andrzej Panufnik is one of the most important and original symphonic composers of the 2nd half of the 20th century. His output includes ten symphonies, with Centenary commissions from Sir Georg Solti for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Seiji Ozawa for Boston. The London Symphony Orchestra commissioned three works from him, and recorded many more of his works under the direction of Jascha Horenstein and then of the composer himself. Leopold Stokowski premièred several of his works in the USA and England. Gennady Rozhdestvensky recorded his Hommage à Chopin in Leningrad. The young Evelyn Glennie first came to prominence winning the Shell-LSO Scholarship with his Concertino for Timpani, Percussion & Strings; this work later received its US première conducted by André Previn. Yehudi Menuhin commissioned his Violin Concerto for the Windsor Festival and recorded it with Panufnik conducting. Mstislav Rostropovich premièred and recorded his Cello Concerto with the LSO, and the Royal Philharmonic Society commissioned his Ninth Symphony, which was premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer. In addition to four concertos, he composed three string quartets, three cantatas and many works for chamber and string ensembles. His works are probably as much recorded as any classical composer’s of that period. Choreographers of his music have included Martha Graham, Kenneth MacMillan, Krzysztof Pastor, Robert Cohan, David Bintley, Gerald Arpino, Emil Wesołowski and Paul Mejia.

Born in Warsaw on 24th September 1914, Panufnik started to compose at the age of nine. He graduated from the Warsaw Conservatoire with Distinction in both composition and conducting, developing his classical conducting skills as a favourite pupil of Felix Weingartner at the Vienna Academy, and then studying French Impressionist composers with Philippe Gaubert in Paris, with further music explorations in London. Just before the outbreak of World War II Panufnik returned to Warsaw to look after his parents.

In Nazi-occupied Poland, with public concerts banned, he arranged a massive amount of classical music for two pianos which he played as a duo in “artistic cafés” with his friend and contemporary Witold Lutosławski; also performing with his Jewish violinist friend Tadeusz (known post-war as Thadé Geisler). Despite the Nazi terror in Warsaw, at great personal risk he conducted illegal concerts and composed patriotic resistance songs, including the still-famous Warszawskie Dzieci. During the war he lost most of his closest relatives, as well as every note of music he had composed in his first 30 years, including two symphonies, destroyed by fire during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.

In 1945 the 31-year-old Panufnik, eager to help the revival of classical music post-war, was appointed chief conductor of the Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra, having to seek out instrumentalists, old and young, scattered all over Poland. Then, in 1946 he was similarly asked to restore the Warsaw Philharmonic to life.

In those early post-war years, he began to reconstruct his lost symphonies and other works, but soon decided he must bury the past and start afresh. He kept only three restorations, his Five Polish Peasant Songs, the Piano Trio (his Opus 1) and Tragic Overture (dedicated to his courageous brother Mirek, a radio operator in the Polish Underground). He won international admiration and honours in his own country, the originality of those mid-1940s works establishing him as the “father” of the Polish avant-garde.

After 1948, with the imposition of Soviet Socialist Realism, Panufnik’s situation changed dramatically. As Poland’s leading composer, greatly respected throughout Europe, he was under much more intense pressure than his compatriots, bullied to write according to the Soviet imposition of Socialist Realism, artificially “positive” music composed according to the dictates of the authorities. Everything he composed of value was condemned as “western, bourgeois, decadent”. In 1949, the centenary of Chopin’s death, he was elected Vice-President of the Music Council of UNESCO, though the Polish authorities never allowed him to attend any connected ceremonies or concerts. He worked tirelessly to try to obtain better financial and other help for his fellow composers and cared deeply about the future of Polish music; however, creatively stultified by criticism, restrictions and intolerable political pressures, he ceased to be able to compose, the driving force of his life thus extinguished. In 1954 he made a dramatic escape from Poland as a protest against Communist control over creative artists, and this resulted in a raft of vicious propaganda and lies put out about him followed by total censorship of his name and his music in Poland for 23 years

Eventually, from 1977, Panufnik works were gradually performed in the ever-innovatory Warsaw Autumn Festival thanks to the insistence of his fellow Polish composers. Having left as a protest, he refused to return to Poland while the Communists were still in power. In 1990, when democracy was restored, he made a momentous return to the city of his birth for the performance of eleven of his works at the Festival. He was greeted on the airport tarmac by a crowd carrying red roses and brass players performing his Fanfare.

If you aren’t already familiar, now you are. As for the rest – sit back and relax. This concert’s a good one.
Enjoy.

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