It was in the early 1950s - accounts differ as to the exact year, though I think it was 1953 - that I first heard of Andrzej Panufnik. I know it was in Al Braver's Smoke Shop, just outside Sather Gate, where I daylighted from my graduate assistantship at U.C., Berkeley: i.e., I opened up the shop at dawn for Al, who preferred banker's hours. Right there on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle it said how Andrzej Panufnik, Poland's Most Famous Composer, had Defected to the West.
I was glad to get the news, for Defecting to the West in those McCarthyized days was considered a Very Good Thing. I was surprised to see that old A.P. was Poland's Greatest Composer, since I had always supposed that honor to belong to Fred Chopin, even though he lived and worked in Paris and Majorca.
Anyhow, once Panufnik settled in England, I heard no more of him for longer than a decade, and assumed that he had had to abandon his career in order to eat and was, at best, scrubbing theater foyers in Piccadilly. Then gradually samples of his music began to turn up on (mostly imported) records, and I came to see that - at least by my lights - the reporters hadn't been too far off the mark. He has, of course, been somewhat obscured by the flashier Penderecki and the more with it Lutoslawski, but I suspect that he may come to be regarded as at least the equal of either.
Panufnik's father, Tomasz, was a wellknown Polish violin maker; his mother was an English concert violinist named Matilda Tonnes, and doubtless the pair made beautiful music together. Andrzej was born 26 days after the onset of World War I. He began composing at nine, got through the Warsaw Conservatory in jig time (12/8), studied conducting with Felix Weingartner, and went in 1938 to Paris for further work with Philippe Gaubert. But by the summer of 1939 he decided Paris was not a good place to be and got home just before Hitler marched into Poland.
During the war years he worked as half of a two-piano team with Lutoslawski in Warsaw nightclubs. All of his compositions went up in smoke in the 1944 burning of the city, though he managed to rewrite three from memory. At war's end he became conductor first of the Cracow Philharmonic and then of its Warsaw counterpart. Soon he was the government's fair-haired musical boy, winning all sorts of prizes and being sent frequently abroad to demonstrate how music thrives under a Communist regime. That was where things began to slip.
Soon there were increasing whispers that he had sold out to the godless bourgeois international formalists, or whatever. The Heroic Overture that he wrote for the Helsinki Olympics in 1952 was banned in Poland and there were demands for a public burning of the score. Within months he and Scarlett, his English wife, made their break.
From 1957 to 1959 Panufnik was conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra. In 1961 he became a British citizen and settled at Twickenham with his wife Camilla. It has been said that that locale is appropriate, for it is, of course, watched over by the spirit of that apostle of order Alexander Pope, and order is the hallmark of Panufnik's post-1961 works.
The Eighth Symphony, dedicated (like many Polish artworks) to Our Lady of Czestochowa (represented by a miraculous icon), was begun in 1980, fortuitously at the same time as the Gdansk strikes that led to the formation of Solidarity, and (like all of Panufnik's best work) is deeply felt. As a commission from the Boston Symphony, it was also designed to show off the sound and virtuosity of that great orchestra. It is a work that I like more with each hearing. The first movement, conceived with geometrical logic, is an affair of breathtaking delicacy. It is set off by a second (and final) counterpart that is energetic, urgent, and powerful - a demonstration of "teamwork" says its composer.
Roger Sessions, now 87, has long reigned as the Grand Old Man of American music, a significant number of whose current creators have been shaped by him. (When I was an undergraduate, my lit prof, John Theobald, asked my music prof, Howard Brubeck, if he'd ever heard of a composer named Roger Sessions. "Good Lord!" said Howard, "That's as if I asked you if you ever heard of a poet named T.S. Eliot!")
Sessions's music is dissonant and uncompromising, but richly rewards those who take the trouble to listen to and understand it. The composer has enjoyed a lifetime association with the BSO, for whose centenary he completed this commission in his 85th year, as strongly and formidably as ever. It too is an orchestral showpiece which operates chiefly through unorthodox instrumental groupings.
