Polish composer, conductor Krzysztof Penderecki dies at 86.
WARSAW, Poland -- Krzysztof Penderecki, an award-winning conductor and one of the world’s most popular contemporary classical music composers whose works have featured in Hollywood films like “The Shining” and “Shutter Island,” died Sunday at age 86.
A violinist and a committed educator, he built a music center across the road from his home in southern Poland, where young virtuosos have the chance to learn from and play with world-famous masters. His 1960 “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” won him a UNESCO prize. Written for 52 string instruments, it can be described as a massive plaintive scream.
In 1967 he composed a major choral work, “Dies Irae,” known also as the “Auschwitz Oratorio” in homage to the Holocaust victims. Penderecki wrote for virtuosos and friends like violinists Isaak Stern and Anne-Sophie Mutter and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. In 2012 he recorded an album with Greenwood, Radiohead’s guitarist.
But Penderecki said his “greatest fascination in life” was not music — it was trees. Around his manor house, he arranged a scenic arboretum featuring the various kinds of trees and plants that he brought from the most distant corners of the world where his music was played.
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