In 1961, a new and difficult work for strings announced the arrival of a composer with a new and difficult name: Krzysztof Penderecki. Having lived as a young man under Nazi occupation and then under Poland’s repressive and ultra-conservative Communist regime, it’s not surprising, perhaps, that as a young composer Penderecki developed an ultra-modern, rebelliously-experimental musical style.

The success of his “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” made Penderecki famous worldwide. Subsequent choral works, operas, and more experimental orchestral works followed for the next dozen years or so.

By 1973, however, he accepted a commission for a symphony—a rather traditional form for a rebellious composer. On today’s date that year, Penderercki himself conducted its first performance, with the London Symphony at Peterbourough Cathedral in central England. While his First Symphony remained in his aggressively experimental style, Penderecki would go on to write several more, each in much more conservative musical language, influenced by more traditional composers like Bruckner and Shostakovich.

This music is from the finale to his Symphony No. 3, for example… "[My composing in this style],” explained Penderecki, “maybe goes a little back in time, but it goes back in order to go forward. With all the complications of the new discoveries in music, many composers, myself included, had to stop and think about history, about tradition. Sometimes music has to stop and relax a little bit. Sometimes it's good to look back and to learn from the past."