Description
Andrzej Panufnik's Noctune won first prize in the Karol Szymanowski Competition in Poland and soon after (1948) conducted its first performance in Paris. The next year the situation of every creative artist in Poland changed drastically when a most significant conference of Polish composers was organised by the Communist Party. Here, for the first time, a fierce attack was launched on 'formalism' in music. Panufnik's Nocturne was performed during this conference. Being an abstract work and having no power to 'mobilise' politically, being neither 'national in form' no 'socialist in content', it was labelled 'formalistic'.
Initially, Andrzej Panufnik's Fantasia for piano and orchestra was the first movement of the original version of his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1961). Soon aft er its premiere in Birmingham on 25 January 1962, Kendall Taylor, the work's first performer, advised the composer to agree for the movement to be played as a separate piece. In 1972, Panufnik rewrote the Concerto by removing Fantasia and leaving just two movements - the slow middle part, and the fast final part. Simultaneously, he wrote to the publisher indicating that he wanted Fantasia to become a stand-alone composition. Eventually, however, it remained un published, and in 1982 the composer used some of the material to write the short Entrata, which opens the final - again three-movement - version of the Piano Concerto. However, a ready-for-publication score of Fantasia was preserved in the composer's archive. Discovered several years later by his wife, it was published, and - as a separate composition - presented in Poznan on 9 November 2024 by the British pianist Clare Hammond, who performed the piece with Poznan Philharmonic Orchestra led by Lukasz Borowicz.
