Born in 1933 in Dębica. His first teacher of composition was Franciszek Skołyszewski. In 1954 he was admitted to the State Higher School of Music in Cracow where he studied composition with Artur Malawski and, on Malawski's death, with Stanisław Wiechowicz. In 1960 he captured the attention of Western critics with Anaklasis, performed at the Donaueschingen Festival under the direction of Hans Rosbaud. Penderecki's international position was consolidated in the 1960s, thanks to such pieces as Dimensions of Time and Silence, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, Polymorphia, Fluorescences, String Quartet No. 1, Dies irae and Stabat Mater. The St Luke Passion brought Penderecki the Great Arts Award of the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia (1966) and the Prix Italia in 1967. In the same year, he was also awarded the Sibelius Gold Medal.
Towards the end of the 1960s he began work on the opera The Devils of Loudun. After its premiere at the Hamburg Staatsoper in 1969, it was successfully performed at theatres throughout the world, as were the composer's three successive operas: Paradise Lost (premiered in Chicago, 1978), Die Schwarze Maske (premiered at the Salzburg Festival, 1986) and Ubu Rex (premiered at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, 1991).
In 1996 the performance of The Seven Gates of Jerusalem, commissioned by the city of Jerusalem, was one of the highlights of the celebrations of the city's 3000th anniversary.
From 1973 to 1978 Penderecki lectured at Yale University in New Haven. He served as Rector of the Music Academy in Cracow (1982-87). Since 1973 he has also developed a career as a conductor. Penderecki's long list of honours includes the Herder Prize (1977), the Sibelius Prize (1983), the Premio Lorenzo Magnifico (1985), the Award of the Karl Wolff Foundation in Israel (1987), the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1990), the title of Chevalier de Saint Georges (1990), the Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville (1992), the Commander's Cross with Star of Polonia Restituta (1993), the Austrian honorary distinction for achievements in science and arts (1994) the unesco International Music Council Award (1994). In 1998 he was honoured with the Composition Award of the Association for the Promotion of European Industry and Trade, in 2000 he received the Cannes Classical Award as 'The Best Living Composer of the Year'. On 2 October of this year he will be honoured by the Bavarian Catholic Academy with the R. Guardini Award (its former recipients include Carl Orff and Richard Weizsaecker).
Penderecki has received honorary doctorates from numerous universities, including those in Belgrade, Bordeaux, Glasgow, Leuven, Madrid, Pittsburgh, PoznaÄ, Rochester, Warsaw, Washington (Georgetown University), as well as the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow and the St. Olaf College in Northfield (Minnesota). He is an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in London, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, the Kungliga Musikaliska Akademien in Stockholm, and the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
He is also Honorary Professor of the Conservatory in Beijing.
Penderecki's book, The Labyrinth of Time. Five Addresses for the End of the Millennium, was published in Polish (Warsaw, 'Presspublica', 1997) and in English (Chapel Hill, 1998).

Selected works (since 1979): Symphony No. 2 'Christmas' (1979c80), Te Deum for solo voices, two choirs and orchestra (1979-80), Concerto per violoncello ed orchestra No. 2 (1982), Concerto per viola ed orchestra (1983), Polish Requiem for solo voices, choir and orchestra (1980-84, new version 1993), Die Schwarze Maske, opera after Gerhart Hauptmann (1984-86), Per Slava for solo cello (1985-86), Ize cheruvimi / Song of Cherubims for a cappella choir (1987), Symphony No. 3 (1988-95), Passacaglia for orchestra (1988), Der unterbrochene Gedanke for string quartet (1988), Adagio. Symphony No. 4 (1989), Ubu Rex, opera buffa after Alfred Jarry (1990-91), String Trio (1990-91), Sinfonietta per archi (1992), Symphony No. 5 (1992), Concerto per flauto ed orchestra da camera (1992), Metamorphosen. Violin Concerto No. 2 (1992-95), Quartet for Clarinet and String Trio (1993), Sinfonietta no. 2 per clarinetto ed archi (1994), Entrata for brass instruments and timpani (1994), Divertimento per violoncello solo (1994), Concerto per violino ed orchestra No. 2 (1992-95), Concerto per clarinetto ed orchestra da camera (1992-95), Seven Gates of Jerusalem for soloists, reciter, three mixed choirs and orchestra (1996), Serenade for String Orchestra (1996-97), Hymne an den heiligen Daniel 'Slawa swjatamu dlinnju knazju moskowskamu' for choir and wind instruments (1997), Credo for soloists, children's choir, mixed choir and symphony orchestra (1998), Musik für Blockflöten, Marimbaphon und Streicher (2000), Sextet for Violin, Viola, Cello, Clarinet, Horn and Piano (2000), Concerto grosso for three cellos and orchestra (2000-01), Piano Concerto 'Resurrection' (2001-02).

Piano Concerto 'Resurrection'
Works for solo instrument and orchestra make up a large proportion of Penderecki's voluminous output. This is not surprising, for the concerto form, with its sharply profiled interplay between an individual instrument (or several such) and the orchestral group, is in essence a dramatic form, and Penderecki is at heart a dramatist. The dialectical principles of the sonata style have been of a more marginal interest for him; even the symphonies he wrote between 1972 and 1992 steered largely clear of sonata-form strategies. Penderecki's concern is less with developmental techniques than with effect, not 'mere effects' but the effect of music on the listener insofar as the composer can envisage and plan for it. He is instinctual in method, and seizes the discoveries of others, as composers have been doing for centuries, whenever they suit his purpose. As he has put it himself, 'I take what I can use and make something new out of it. '

Penderecki's legitimate annexations from the common stock of musical language have ranged over the centuries. He has drawn from Stravinskyan rhythm, Bachian counterpoint, Second-Viennese-School 12-note series, noise constructs à la Varèse, and the glissandos and clouds of sonority pioneered by his older compatriot Andrzej Panufnik and by Iannis Xenakis. He has drawn also on the legacies of folk song and Gregorian chant. The interest of all these resources for him lies not in their status as vehicles of universal laws, but in their appropriateness to his expressive needs.

As these needs have changed, so Penderecki's stylistic outlook has shifted. Between about the time of the Stabat Mater (1962) and that of the Violin Concerto and Paradise Lost toward the end of the 1970s, the trend of his evolution was away from serialism and noise and correspondingly toward a rapprochement with the traditions of both the distant and the more recent romantic past. Subsequently the 19th century has continued to exercise a sway (under a strikingly Brucknerish guise in Symphony No. 2 and the Passacaglia and Adagio of Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4). But at the same time such works as the opera The Black Mask have explored an early-20th-century vein of expressionism well matched to Penderecki's often lugubrious choice of subjects, and he has also sought to reintroduce into a predominantly neo-romantic idiom some of the harsher and more outlandish sonorities that marked his early works.
Since 1990 there has been a perceptible lightening of touch. Ubu Rex is by some margin the least portentous of the four operas; Symphony No. 5, while still substantial in scale, allows more relaxation than its predecessors.

Given such a composer's natural affinity for the concerto genre, it is perhaps surprising that he should have waited so long to write a piano concerto. This is the explanation, which Penderecki gave to me in a telephone conversation just after he had completed the work:
ŇI refrained from writing a piano concerto for many years because I was afraid. There are so many good concertos written in the 20th century, above all the ones by Bartók and Prokofiev. With the violin and cello, there was less competition. But finally, after writing a concerto grosso with three cellos [...] I decided to tackle it, and to combine the piano concerto idea with elements of the sinfonia concertante.
I started work on the Piano Concerto in June [2001], and within three months it was about half done, in the style of a kind of capriccio. But then, after September 11, the conception changed completely, and I wrote a darker, more serious work. I went back to a certain point in the structure and composed a kind of chorale. This makes its first appearance about a third of the way through the piece, returns later, and then again for a third time at the end; it's played there rather slowly, at an allegro moderato tempo, and then the Concerto finishes with just a couple of quicker bars.

A Penderecki work would hardly be Penderecki without an element of darkness in it. At the same time, perhaps because this concerto is for the piano rather than for one of the melody instruments such as violin or cello, the music moves some distance away from the rather heavily interwoven combinations of melodic lines characteristic of much Penderecki in the 1980s, in favour of restoring some of the clarity and crispness of his earlier manner, and it thus carries forward the trend of lightening touch already suggested.
Bernard Jacobson
(excerpts from the programme notes for the world premiere
of the Concerto on 9 May 2002 in New York's Carnegie Hall)