100th Anniversary of the Polish Composers’ Union
and
80th Anniversary of PWM Edition

The biblical motif of Jacob’s ladder was a tempting source of inspiration for numerous painters, who depicted angels climbing it and God towering above it in a variety of ways. Similarly, in literary works, we find various interpretations of the ladder as metaphorically symbolising a path. But how can that symbol be translated into the language of music? Krzysztof Penderecki undertook this task in the 1970s. In the context of his oeuvre as a whole, The Dream of Jacob was one of the last steps on the path from sonorism to neoromantic inspirations. While this composition symbolically closed a certain stage of the Polish avant-garde, Karol Szymanowski’s Symphony No. 3, composed during the second decade of the twentieth century, threw its doors wide open again. Inspired by Middle Eastern culture, the composer used Sufi poetry translated by Tadeusz Miciński. Szymanowski’s extraordinary inventiveness allowed him to create a mystical, highly evocative – albeit somewhat dreamlike – image of the Orient.

An excellent link between Szymanowski and Penderecki is one of the most frequently performed compositions in the world, by another great classic of Polish music. Witold Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra was written in the mid-twentieth century for the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, which was awaiting the reconstruction of its home, destroyed during the war. Drawing on Polish folklore, Lutosławski created a completely free generic paraphrase of Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, which is in no way inferior to the original.

Bartłomiej Gembicki