Krzysztof Penderecki

condition (records/cover): NM / EX-

In October 1970, Krzysztof Penderecki received one of the strangest commissions in the history of contemporary music. The United Nations, marking its twenty-fifth anniversary, asked him to compose a work for the occasion. The premiere, conducted by Zubin Mehta with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, took place at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on 24 October 1970 in the presence of heads of state, members of royal families, and prime ministers. The result, Kosmogonia, is a twenty-minute work for three soloists, mixed chorus, and orchestra, and it is among the strangest things Penderecki wrote - a kind of secular cosmogony assembled from ancient and modern sources: Sophocles, Ovid, Lucretius, Nicholas of Cusa, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and the words of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and American astronaut John Glenn, all woven into a single Latin, Italian, Russian, and English texture.

The Muza LP pairs it with two other works that show Penderecki's orchestral language in its most concentrated form. Dimensions of Time and Silence (1961), for a forty-part chorus of mixed voices, percussion, and strings, is one of the most radical experiments in vocal texture of the early 1960s - the voice treated as a sound-producing instrument without semantic content, the text from which it draws letters and phonemes dissolved into pure material. De Natura Sonoris II (1971), the sequel to the 1966 work that had appeared on the Philips LP with Polymorphia, takes the orchestral sonorism of the earlier period and inflects it with the more lyrical, harmonically suspended language beginning to emerge in Penderecki's work at this moment.

Soprano Stefania Woytowicz, tenor Kazimierz Pustelak, bass Bernard Ładysz, Warsaw National Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra under Andrzej Markowski. Original Muza pressing with Polish and English liner notes.