As a cellist I can say only - there is probably no music (excepting Shostakovich and Prokofiev...) for cellist, which could give us bigger pleasure while playing! No Dvorak, no Schumann, no Haydn. Penderecki uses every possibilities of our instrument, perfectly knows what we can do and what we dream of - intensity, emotions, high register, virtuosity - all of this is in this concerto. And beautiful harmonies - nothing else we need to be happy :) A great gift for cellists from this composer - having so many different musical faces. This week I played his Credo and this music cannot also leave my mind, is still there, so moving...
I remember playing this wonderful Concerto Grosso in an all-cello orchestra at Oxford Cello School when I was 16. Unfortunately, I'm not in touch with any of the friends I made there anymore, so I'll just have to reminisce alone.
Well... it was a once in a lifetime experience but something like 15 or so years ago K. Penderecki himself came to Athens in Greece and directed the Polish Requiem played by the National Greek Symphony Orchestra and Choir. Unforgetable !
I have this played by Monighetti, Noras and the Warsaw Natl Phil Orch (Kwiatkowski plays in both). This is every bit as good if not better for my taste, with celli more forward. Thanks.
+Peter Bouchier There are tens of thousands of young people studying wit the great masters of or time .Art and genius never stop though it seems the ability of the public to keepup with music hat faces the challenges and sounds like today's contemporary is decidedly small.People want to be entertained .Queen and Prince and Bowie and Eno and all the rock and roll boys learn from our roots .Stravinsky and Schoenberg are more mindfully revolutionary than almost anything ecer experienced in rock.Only jazz comes up to the limitless possibilities of classical origins .
"Queen and Prince and Bowie and Eno and all the rock and roll boys learn from our roots" I suppose that you could also say that Frank Zappa and Sonic Youth learn from the roots as well.
No matter how great something is, you will get tired of it. We need new music, serious music. The idea of the Artist can be a problem. I think Bach thought of himself more as a Craftsman who could turn out a workable piece of music for any occasion. Holding yourself to a standard of total originality and calling everything Art is very daunting.
+Alteridade Absoluta Shostakovich on a permanent diet of horror movies and LSD, if you ask me. Some of Penderecki's works are very impressive, but there is a great "sameness" about them -- more so than in the case of most composers. His 3rd Symphony is, to my mind, his masterpiece.
I hear many protesting that music must progress and that Penderecki is headed backwards against the flow. But isn't it possible that we took a wrong turn at Schoenberg, and have been exploring a large empty dead end ever since? And Penderecki is leading us out of the wastelands? Classical music has been losing its' audience for a century and for good reason. Locally, if the VSO wants to sell out, they have to go all the way back to Mozart to find something people are willing to listen to. Or back to Holst at the least.
@@authenticbaguette6673 One superior way? Well, it's certainly not one of MY ideas. However I do believe there are an infinitude of inferior ways. Which explains why not every toddler with a drum is considered a prodigy. There might not be A Right Way but there are certainly many wrong ways and I think serialism was one of them. One of the less obviously bad ones, a way that captured to many for too long. I see Penderecki as leading us out of the desert, to a mountaintop from which many paths extend in many directions.
Penderecki was not a reactionary, he just did what he wanted, always has. You on the other hand do have very much a reactionary discourse. Everything after Schoenberg a dead end???? i do not think the master would have agreed to such discourse. On the contrary! Ligeti? Schnittke? Xenakis? Stockhausen? Varese? John Cage? electronic, electroacoustic and concrete and tape music? Morton Subotnick? what about Penderecki himself?. The list goes on and on, without all of those there would have been great loss to music. Don't fool yourself with a nostalgia of the past. There was an astonishing amount of good music made because of Schoenberg innovations. Schoenberg did good. He started something that give birth to amazing artistic revelations and new attitudes in music. It even reached as far as free jazz, improvisation and modern electronic music. If anything, the orchestras are dying because they don't do the job of representing living music, the very nostalgia you preach upon is what is killing it. As much as i love Beethoven and Mozart, Ligeti and Penderecki should be known today by the majority the same way much as the old masters are known in their days and today still because they are definitively of the same caliber. And be in many more concert programs. Musical institutions needs to be of their time. Composers dead since hundred of years should be the exceptions on programs not the norm.
@@thefxbip315 It sounds to me like you are making an argument for novelty at any cost. As time passes, it is to be expected that a genius will appear from time to time, meaning that the old music becomes steadily harder and harder to improve on. So it makes sense to expect that over time, older music will come to dominate the program and the performance of new works will, more and more, become an exceptional and rare event. There are those who believe the tastes of musicians and composers override those of the listening public. It is this belief that is driving classical music into the ground. We forget that Bach, Beethoven and Mozart were once the pop music of their time. What is needed is compositions based on sound theory, with a youthful energy and drive. Some of the Beatles' works that incorporate orchestras come to mind. And Penderecki of course is headed in the right direction.
@@Tubluer I am not. Novelty is but one of the many attitudes that shapes music. I love traditional music for example and a lot of very tonal electronic or songs. But what i can't stand is the pathetic anti-modernist stances of those who are afraid of novelty in arts. Innovation in arts must be defended. Did you ever read about Ligeti or Shostakovich lifes? when taken to extremes anti-modernistic attitudes become anti-creative rules and censorship. I will always speak firmly against such attitudes. Many composers fought against oppressive governments and sometime had to compose in secret because of the possible consequences of creating modern works, they had to fight to be able to express their artistic truth.
I don't claim to have any great insight, but notice that 80 000 viewed this and 9 million viewed Schuman piano concerto in about the same period. I don't know what the numbers would be for Schonberg piano concerto (I have listened to my copy about twice). I believe that few people are willing to re-jig their brains so that e.g. serial music sounds "wonderful", but its your brain. It seems that many great composers took a dip, I think of Hindemith, Rochberg, Ives, Vaughn Williams, Gorecki, before seeing that you cant throw the baby out with the water. Ives said that he could not expect his family to starve on his dissonances. Humans evolved to enjoy emotion.
I think what we need after so many failed experiments of modernists and postmodernists alike, is to return to tonal and harmonic roots of the past centuries and reinterpret these universal structural achievements anew. This cacophonic chaos should be overcome once and for all. We need new meanings in life and in arts, away from the spiritual dead end we are undergoing since at least 20th century.
Why should we take a step backwards? If that music was perfect people wouldnt progress further, we would still listen to the same things that people listened to back then, and if there are no experiments, music and/or everything else would be static and boring. I think that we need more people that experiment, because there is a bunch of them doing the same thing over and over again. Music doesnt have to sound safe, chill, fluid, agressive and all those things you want to feel, music is art, and art should bring all kinds of emotions, not just the ones you feel good about!
I know that I will ahve almost evrybody against me, but I do not approve the "neo-postromantism" of Penderecki, who was one of the leaders of the "avant-garde" of the 60's and the 70's. It is a bit like the neoclasical scores of Stravinski, it is pleasant to hear them from time to time but they brought no progress to the music.
The novelist Peter De Vries wrote apropos avant-garde literature, "There is no where for fiction to go except back to narrative, just as there is no where for a drunk to go except back home." Same applies to music and tonality. And as Nietzsche wrote, "Progress is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea."
Tout à fait d'accord avec vous. Il y a une régression dans le style de Penderecki. C'est peut-être très bien écrit, mais comment peut-on parler de création quand plus rien n'est inventé ? Or un artiste doit créer.
Vous pourriez dire la même chose de Ligeti, vous et quelques autres... Ces deux compositeurs à la sensibilité proches n'ont fait qu'inventer! Le temps leur donnera raison et réhabilitera si besoin est, leurs oeuvres flamboyantes !
@@MegaCirse Je ne suis pas d'accord avec la comparaison avec Ligeti qui, à mon avis, n'a jamas renié ses différentes périodes créatrices, au contraire de Penderecki qui est passé à côté d'une oeuvre qui aurait pu être véritablement fascinante. Il a renoncé à une évolution qui aurait pu le mener vers un style proche de celui de Lachenmann par exemple. Le terme "flamboyant" convient mieux aussi à l'oeuvre de Ligeti qu'à celle de Penderecki, à part peut-être son arboretum.
Je vous sais gré de m'avoir orienté vers Lachenmann.. Par ailleurs et à ma connaissance, K. Penderecki n'est pas mort, même s'il est probablement inactif aujourd'hui musicalement parlant ! Mais ce dernier a évolué suffisament loin pour ne pas revenir en arrière et se répéter, comme tout grand compositeur qui se respecte. Les architectures musicales de Ligeti et Penderecki sont si proches l'une de l'autre, dans la désespérance, ou la désagrégation si vous préférez, de leur temps ;-)
As a cellist I can say only - there is probably no music (excepting Shostakovich and Prokofiev...) for cellist, which could give us bigger pleasure while playing! No Dvorak, no Schumann, no Haydn. Penderecki uses every possibilities of our instrument, perfectly knows what we can do and what we dream of - intensity, emotions, high register, virtuosity - all of this is in this concerto. And beautiful harmonies - nothing else we need to be happy :) A great gift for cellists from this composer - having so many different musical faces. This week I played his Credo and this music cannot also leave my mind, is still there, so moving...
Thank you, I love Shostakovich and Penderecki but am not familiar w/ Prokofiev for cello, am looking forward to it...
Schnittke?
Beethoven ???
Way ahead of it's time. Refreshingly original. Perfect music to think by. Thanks for posting.
A contemporary masterpiece !!!!!!!
Fantastic recording of a wonderful work. Thank you
The great composer is conducting his own composition ! What more ?
A lot of thanks
Great and refreshing.
!!!!! Thanks!!!
Алена Меркулова !?!?!? No wurreez !!!??!???!!!
Thank you!
so out there. Love love love.
R.I.P. 29.3.2020
Theodore Aravanis indeed , he will be missed ..
I remember playing this wonderful Concerto Grosso in an all-cello orchestra at Oxford Cello School when I was 16. Unfortunately, I'm not in touch with any of the friends I made there anymore, so I'll just have to reminisce alone.
This is wonderful
beautiflu beautiful!
E' stato l'ultimo grande compositore, e questo concerto lo dimostra ancora una volta. Sonorità eccellenti.
La cover è di James Brooks
merci
would love to see an orcestra play Krzysztof's music
Really haunting. It is difficult to find non-minimalist contemporary music that is moving.
Bien dit, j'applaudis des deux mains !
Beautiful
Ein sensationelles Werk!
Che opera meravigliosa: qui c'è la vera essenza (senza l'utilizzo, da parte dell'autore, di tanti giri di parole musicali) dell'uomo contemporaneo.
Well... it was a once in a lifetime experience but something like 15 or so years ago K. Penderecki himself came to Athens in Greece and directed the Polish Requiem played by the National Greek Symphony Orchestra and Choir. Unforgetable !
bardzo bardzo piekne i usmiech na srode piekna !
Проникновенно...
I have this played by Monighetti, Noras and the Warsaw Natl Phil Orch (Kwiatkowski plays in both). This is every bit as good if not better for my taste, with celli more forward. Thanks.
One of Penderecki's 'normal' works! Didn't know he could write them!
Haha
great
Timeless.
Boston Symphony under Dutoit this week! (11/28/13)
They're playing this tonight at the Proms. BBC Radio 3 if you're not in London
Excellent work. I do hear many motifs from Credo, though.
So it is possible after all, to write a 'classical' piece in modern times!
Peter Bouchier It uses modern techniques
+Peter Bouchier there are a lot of composer in our century
+Peter Bouchier There are tens of thousands of young people studying wit the great masters of or time .Art and genius never stop though it seems the ability of the public to keepup with music hat faces the challenges and sounds like today's contemporary is decidedly small.People want to be entertained .Queen and Prince and Bowie and Eno and all the rock and roll boys learn from our roots .Stravinsky and Schoenberg are more mindfully revolutionary than almost anything ecer experienced in rock.Only jazz comes up to the limitless possibilities of classical origins .
"Queen and Prince and Bowie and Eno and all the rock and roll boys learn from our roots"
I suppose that you could also say that Frank Zappa and Sonic Youth learn from the roots as well.
No matter how great something is, you will get tired of it. We need new music, serious music. The idea of the Artist can be a problem. I think Bach thought of himself more as a Craftsman who could turn out a workable piece of music for any occasion. Holding yourself to a standard of total originality and calling everything Art is very daunting.
wonderful music, who is the terrific painting by?
James Brooks
@@drapik9144 tnx
10:20
The painting? Pollock? Krasner? Toddler?
Possibly an elephant.
A herd of elephants 2 milliseconds after being blown up in a terror attack by ISIS for not reading the Koran.
James Brooks
It sounds like shostakovich's music....
+Alteridade Absoluta Shostakovich on a permanent diet of horror movies and LSD, if you ask me. Some of Penderecki's works are very impressive, but there is a great "sameness" about them -- more so than in the case of most composers. His 3rd Symphony is, to my mind, his masterpiece.
And not only!
DSCH ??
Why trash ? Je ne comprends pas bien...... :-( Ah oui excusez-moi, je suis français .......... :-)
@@MegaCirse Dmitri SCHostakovich. Schostakovich used his Initials in many of his works and most blatantly in the finale of his great 10th symphony.
I hear many protesting that music must progress and that Penderecki is headed backwards against the flow. But isn't it possible that we took a wrong turn at Schoenberg, and have been exploring a large empty dead end ever since? And Penderecki is leading us out of the wastelands? Classical music has been losing its' audience for a century and for good reason. Locally, if the VSO wants to sell out, they have to go all the way back to Mozart to find something people are willing to listen to. Or back to Holst at the least.
Tubluer this idea of there being this one superior way of doing music is nonsense to begin with .
F*ck boulez .
@@authenticbaguette6673 One superior way? Well, it's certainly not one of MY ideas. However I do believe there are an infinitude of inferior ways. Which explains why not every toddler with a drum is considered a prodigy. There might not be A Right Way but there are certainly many wrong ways and I think serialism was one of them. One of the less obviously bad ones, a way that captured to many for too long. I see Penderecki as leading us out of the desert, to a mountaintop from which many paths extend in many directions.
Penderecki was not a reactionary, he just did what he wanted, always has. You on the other hand do have very much a reactionary discourse. Everything after Schoenberg a dead end???? i do not think the master would have agreed to such discourse. On the contrary! Ligeti? Schnittke? Xenakis? Stockhausen? Varese? John Cage? electronic, electroacoustic and concrete and tape music? Morton Subotnick? what about Penderecki himself?. The list goes on and on, without all of those there would have been great loss to music. Don't fool yourself with a nostalgia of the past. There was an astonishing amount of good music made because of Schoenberg innovations. Schoenberg did good. He started something that give birth to amazing artistic revelations and new attitudes in music. It even reached as far as free jazz, improvisation and modern electronic music. If anything, the orchestras are dying because they don't do the job of representing living music, the very nostalgia you preach upon is what is killing it. As much as i love Beethoven and Mozart, Ligeti and Penderecki should be known today by the majority the same way much as the old masters are known in their days and today still because they are definitively of the same caliber. And be in many more concert programs. Musical institutions needs to be of their time. Composers dead since hundred of years should be the exceptions on programs not the norm.
@@thefxbip315 It sounds to me like you are making an argument for novelty at any cost. As time passes, it is to be expected that a genius will appear from time to time, meaning that the old music becomes steadily harder and harder to improve on. So it makes sense to expect that over time, older music will come to dominate the program and the performance of new works will, more and more, become an exceptional and rare event.
There are those who believe the tastes of musicians and composers override those of the listening public. It is this belief that is driving classical music into the ground. We forget that Bach, Beethoven and Mozart were once the pop music of their time. What is needed is compositions based on sound theory, with a youthful energy and drive. Some of the Beatles' works that incorporate orchestras come to mind. And Penderecki of course is headed in the right direction.
@@Tubluer I am not. Novelty is but one of the many attitudes that shapes music. I love traditional music for example and a lot of very tonal electronic or songs. But what i can't stand is the pathetic anti-modernist stances of those who are afraid of novelty in arts. Innovation in arts must be defended. Did you ever read about Ligeti or Shostakovich lifes? when taken to extremes anti-modernistic attitudes become anti-creative rules and censorship. I will always speak firmly against such attitudes. Many composers fought against oppressive governments and sometime had to compose in secret because of the possible consequences of creating modern works, they had to fight to be able to express their artistic truth.
I don't claim to have any great insight, but notice that 80 000 viewed this and 9 million viewed Schuman piano concerto in about the same period. I don't know what the numbers would be for Schonberg piano concerto (I have listened to my copy about twice). I believe that few people are willing to re-jig their brains so that e.g. serial music sounds "wonderful", but its your brain. It seems that many great composers took a dip, I think of Hindemith, Rochberg, Ives,
Vaughn Williams, Gorecki, before seeing that you cant throw the baby out with the water. Ives said that he could not expect his family to starve on his dissonances. Humans evolved to enjoy emotion.
I think what we need after so many failed experiments of modernists and postmodernists alike, is to return to tonal and harmonic roots of the past centuries and reinterpret these universal structural achievements anew. This cacophonic chaos should be overcome once and for all. We need new meanings in life and in arts, away from the spiritual dead end we are undergoing since at least 20th century.
Why should we take a step backwards? If that music was perfect people wouldnt progress further, we would still listen to the same things that people listened to back then, and if there are no experiments, music and/or everything else would be static and boring. I think that we need more people that experiment, because there is a bunch of them doing the same thing over and over again. Music doesnt have to sound safe, chill, fluid, agressive and all those things you want to feel, music is art, and art should bring all kinds of emotions, not just the ones you feel good about!
Yes, contemporary music is about living in the present moment, following where it takes you, never knowing where it is going, watching it.@@djsreja1
Look me up on youtube; my music may appeal to you. Type in John Robertson Symphony 2 and quite a few things of mine come up. Enjoy,
I know that I will ahve almost evrybody against me, but I do not approve the "neo-postromantism" of Penderecki, who was one of the leaders of the "avant-garde" of the 60's and the 70's. It is a bit like the neoclasical scores of Stravinski, it is pleasant to hear them from time to time but they brought no progress to the music.
The novelist Peter De Vries wrote apropos avant-garde literature, "There is no where for fiction to go except back to narrative, just as there is no where for a drunk to go except back home." Same applies to music and tonality. And as Nietzsche wrote, "Progress is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea."
Tout à fait d'accord avec vous. Il y a une régression dans le style de Penderecki. C'est peut-être très bien écrit, mais comment peut-on parler de création quand plus rien n'est inventé ? Or un artiste doit créer.
Vous pourriez dire la même chose de Ligeti, vous et quelques autres... Ces deux compositeurs à la sensibilité proches n'ont fait qu'inventer! Le temps leur donnera raison et réhabilitera si besoin est, leurs oeuvres flamboyantes !
@@MegaCirse Je ne suis pas d'accord avec la comparaison avec Ligeti qui, à mon avis, n'a jamas renié ses différentes périodes créatrices, au contraire de Penderecki qui est passé à côté d'une oeuvre qui aurait pu être véritablement fascinante. Il a renoncé à une évolution qui aurait pu le mener vers un style proche de celui de Lachenmann par exemple. Le terme "flamboyant" convient mieux aussi à l'oeuvre de Ligeti qu'à celle de Penderecki, à part peut-être son arboretum.
Je vous sais gré de m'avoir orienté vers Lachenmann.. Par ailleurs et à ma connaissance, K. Penderecki n'est pas mort, même s'il est probablement inactif aujourd'hui musicalement parlant ! Mais ce dernier a évolué suffisament loin pour ne pas revenir en arrière et se répéter, comme tout grand compositeur qui se respecte. Les architectures musicales de Ligeti et Penderecki sont si proches l'une de l'autre, dans la désespérance, ou la désagrégation si vous préférez, de leur temps ;-)
One of the worst music ever made.
Terrifying horror classics.
Klaus-Juergen Kessel Ignoramus
I can see his point, but I can't call it worst, yet he did call it music.
remember Brando on Apocalypse Now: "The horror, the horror..."
kurtz in heart on darkness