Globe and Mail –

Krzysztof Penderecki grows an unfinished symphony

Composer has built what he believes is the largest arboretum in Eastern Europe

By Robert Everett-Green

Published on Sunday, Jan. 31, 2010 2:58PM EST Last updated on Sunday,
Jan. 31, 2010 3:12PM EST

`I always had my roots in the past,’ says Krzysztof Penderecki, the
Polish composer who figured prominently in the postwar avant-garde
before embracing less contentious sounds. Actually, he has deep roots
in the present as well if you count the thousands of trees he has
planted on his 70-acre estate near Krakow.

Penderecki, who is in Toronto this week for six concerts (including an
Esprit Orchestra show Friday) and several speaking events, has written
lots of music in many genres, including 10 oratorios, four operas,
eight symphonies and 15 concertos. Over the past four decades, he has
also built what he believes is the largest arboretum in Eastern
Europe.

`It’s my second passion, after music,’ he says. `I have about 1,700
species of trees, almost everything that can grow in our climate. It’s
like a park, organized into collections. I have an Italian formal
garden, a Japanese garden with a Japanese bridge, and two labyrinths.
… The struggle to shape a big park is like making a symphony – an
unfinished symphony, since it will have to be carried on after me, by
my granddaughter perhaps.’

Big projects come naturally to the 76-year-old composer, whose
catalogue is studded with works about pivotal historical events. His
St. Luke Passion, and his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, made
his name known internationally in the early sixties and helped to thaw
Poland’s restrictive cultural scene. `The communists saw what we did
in the arts as the only product of socialism that was known in the
West, so they tolerated it,’ he says.

Since then, he has oscillated `between the sacred and the profane,
between God and the devil,’ as he says in a 1998 book of lectures
called The Labyrinth of Time. The sacred includes most of the works on
Soundstreams concerts Saturday and Sunday; the profane includes operas
such as Ubu Rex (1986) and Phaedra, which he is writing for St.
Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre.

Penderecki grew up in a part of southeastern Poland that could be
called remote if so many nations hadn’t sent armies through it. He had
an Armenian grandmother and a German grandfather, and his father was a
Greek Orthodox lawyer who played in string quartets. The small town
where the Pendereckis lived was 70 per cent Jewish, mostly Hassidic;
the synagogue was near his house.

Memories of that community came to Penderecki as he wrote his latest
oratorio, a Kaddish for the Lodz ghetto, wiped out by the Nazis in
August, 1944. The piece, part of which appears on Soundstreams
concerts, includes settings of Polish poems by Abramek Cytryn, a
Jewish teenager in the ghetto.

`They’re very beautiful and fantastic and deep, because he knew he was
going to die,’ Penderecki says. These days, he is busy setting
19th-century Polish poems to music for a piece to commemorate Chopin’s
bicentenary, although in general he finds Polish a hard language for
music: Phaedra’s libretto will probably be in German or Russian.

No language is needed to appreciate Penderecki’s arboretum, which is
maintained by five full-time workers and which he says he will
eventually open to the public. He continues to hunt down variants of
the species he already has with a fervour that taxes his wallet and
sometimes annoys his wife.

He started planting the second and larger of his labyrinths four years
ago, using a design planned but not executed for a 14th-century French
church. In the garden, as in the concert hall, the past still feeds
Penderecki’s imagination.

Soundstreams Canada and the University of Toronto present music by
Krzysztof Penderecki, performed by the Polish Chamber Choir, the Elmer
Iseler Singers and the Toronto Children’s Chorus Saturday and Sunday
at Toronto’s Metropolitan United Church.