Jan 31, 2022
“I was aiming for something that seemed unreachable”, said Penderecki of the St Luke Passion, a work written to mark one thousand years of Christianity in Poland, but commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Münster Cathedral. How was such a fundamental expression of faith...
Jan 17, 2022
On 8 September, 1939, when Krzysztof Penderecki was just a few weeks shy of his sixth birthday, German forces took control of his home town of Dębica with its majority Jewish population. Between then and the liquidation of the Dębica ghetto in 1943, the young Penderecki had to witness the Nazi regime’s systematic...
Jan 3, 2022
Fifty two strings. Eight minutes. Thirty seven seconds. Completed in 1960, Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima has become one of his most well-known works thanks to its use in soundtracks of films by David Lynch, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuarón. In this podcast we explore its genesis, how its...