PENDERECKI: UNIVERSAL THEMES, ENDURING MUSIC

Krzysztof Penderecki--burly, bearded and bespectacled--looks properly formal in jacket and tie, the picture of business-like diplomacy. But the pages of music that sprawl across the piano in his downtown hotel suite suggest feverish, ongoing work, not press conferences.

The much-lauded and heavily commissioned Polish composer is behind schedule. As a result, he has canceled everything immediately following his current date with the L.A. Philharmonic in which he conducts the local premiere of his celebrated “St. Luke Passion.”

“The folks in Salzburg are calling me every day for a progress report on the opera I promised them,” he says sheepishly, explaining that first performances of the still-incomplete “Black Mass” are slated for this summer. “The only way I’ll finish on time is if they continue to distrust me and keep putting through those calls.”

Hardly Peck’s bad boy, the 52-year-old native of Debica became the center of a scandal when his “Paradise Lost” finally found its way to the Chicago Lyric Opera two years after the bicentennial celebration for which it was commissioned. American composers like Ezra Laderman, who were furious seeing the plum go to a European, almost had the last laugh when Penderecki missed his deadline.

But the last laugh is no Polish joke. Few composers today wield the world clout of this sometimes maligned figure (pronounced Kshishtof PenderETskee). For the last two decades he has stood in the musical forefront, passing from austere avant-gardist of the ‘60s to neo-Romantic who now adopts a less lush compositional language.

His detractors accuse Penderecki of changing styles just to gain attention or to capitalize on what is popular. But he defends what he calls his “creative freedom” by comparing himself to Picasso.

“Our generation’s most famous artist was not orthodox, either,” says the Roman Catholic who writes everything from liturgical music like the 20-year-old Passion, which audiences will hear starting Friday in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, to operas with themes of terrifying sadism, like “The Devils of Loudun.”

“I’m not a Chagall, who painted very nice pictures but always the same. My music goes zigzag, not in a straight line. In fact, it is impossible at the end of the 20th Century to create as a Mozart did. Our times are too charged with the potential devastation of mankind.”

And that’s another critical issue. By addressing, in his music, such enormities as the Nazi Holocaust and the dropping of the atom bomb, Penderecki has been accused of exploitation. His “Threnody” (1960), for example, was originally titled “Eight minutes, 26 seconds.” Only after it won the contest for which he wrote the piece did the composer rename it “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima.”

The audience sat stunned into silence when then-Philharmonic chief Zubin Mehta conducted it in March of 1968--the highly dramatic, volatile composition could be heard as a narrative of horror. It’s not for nothing that Penderecki--unlike some of his more esoteric brethren--has carved a relative place in the public consciousness.

Yet, he is quick to point out that the creative impulse is not inspired by dedications or programmatic references.

“I wrote ‘Threnody’ in abstract terms,” he says. “Its value as a piece of music lies there and not in the meaning of a tragedy. But if an audience finds meaning through such an association, so be it. I wrote two other works the same year that are equally powerful--their titles are insignificant and they are hardly ever played.”

It’s not surprising, however, that Penderecki connects his music to human suffering. One biographer takes the liberty of saying that the Krakow-trained composer “grew up in the backyard of Auschwitz.” As an Eastern European whose childhood was trammeled with the catastrophe of war and one who, even today, watches his countrymen struggle for Solidarity, for freedom from religious persecution and political oppression, he stands rooted.

Penderecki concedes that “St. Luke” is more dramatic than contemplative and that it falls in line with his quest for universal subjects. Although it employs a complex language he feels that “it is easy to listen to because of its Baroque shape.”

That’s more than he can say for the music of Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter, which he says “seems suspiciously empty.

“If that’s how they appear to me I wonder about the impression made on non-composers. As for minimalism, I think it’s a normal reaction to the complexity of music from the 60s. But it won’t last. It’s too simple.”

About his own place on the musical horizon, Penderecki holds a healthy, if immodest, view.

“I was always an enfant terrible ,” he says matter-of-factly. “Other composers criticized me, they called me a traitor to the avant-garde cause because I took on big projects and wanted to say important things while they were writing 10-minute pieces in Darmstadt. But my music is played because it’s good. Theirs is dead, disappeared.”