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| "Krzysztof Penderecki, Gdańsk, 2008" by Akumiszcza licensed by CC BY 3.0 |
Unquestionably one of contemporary classical music's most iconic figures, the Dębica native - who gained international acclaim following the release of his 1960 hypertonal tribute to the victims at Hiroshima - perished late this past March at the age of 86 following an unspecified illness.
His most famous work, aptly titled "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima," was dedicated to those who perished or fell gravely injured during the second world war after an American B-29 bomber dropped the world's first ever detonated atomic bomb over the Japanese city, eviscerating much of its population on contact and wiping out 70 percent of the land's structures. The jarring, sonoristic work won the composer the prestigious Tribune Internationale des Compositeurs UNESCO the year of its premiere, in 1961.
Many more accolades would follow Penderecki throughout his remaining years, including a two-time Pix Italia win, four Grammy Awards, a Wolf Prize in Arts, and a University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition - all of them serving as compliments to a highly successful reign on public airwaves and on the contemporary classical music collective conscience.
Above: Penderecki's magnum opus, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, performed by the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Antoni Wit.
For those unfamiliar with the late maestro's oeuvre, a portion of the virtual garden - located in the gaming section - is now live. Dubbed "Music Memory," the interactive game allows the online visitor to match together sound bytes of separate works - some of them lesser known pieces - from the composer's catalogue raisonné, intentionally selected by site administrators in the hopes of immersing the casual Penderecki fan further inside his dizzying array of works. Successful matches win the online participant a longer sound file accompanied by opus identification.
The upcoming virtual garden, which may be previewed here, will feature media from participating musicians known to Penderecki whist he was alive, each of them specifically commissioned by AMI to compose music in honor of the composer, and in an effort to showcase famous Pole's incredible versatility as an artist.
Above: the Chor der Warschauer Nationalphilharmonie and Bamberger Symphoniker perform the stunning Lacrimosa from Penderecki's Polish Requiem, with the maestro himself at the helm. (Krakow, 15 June 1988)
Highlighting the genres and moods which inspired the maestro himself - from electronic and jazz, to film music and rock, and from the breathtakingly sublime to the horrifying and visceral, Penderecki's Garden promises to appease both classical connoisseur and newcomer alike.
Master of the avant-garde, Penderecki was known outside of classical music circles as the producer of thrills and
chills - inducing waves of gooseflesh upon the skin of millions of film lovers across the globe. From Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, delectably terrifying selections from the versatile composer's oeuvre have been frequently adapted for film, setting many a tense scene in some of Hollywood's most iconic horror classics. Above: Polymorphia (1961), used in The Exorcist (1963), and, on the right, The Dream of Jacob, 1974, used in The Shining (1980). Link: the Passacaglia - Allegro Moderato from Symphony No.3, used in Shutter Island.
Footnotes:
-Rose.
- Play "Music Memory" now at http://www.memorypenderecki.pl/
- Visit the Virtual Garden (preview only, "full bloom" on 23 November, 2020) at https://pendereckisgarden.pl/
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