Krzysztof Penderecki

Born 23 November 1933 in Poland, Penderecki graduated from the Academy of Music in Krakow and began teaching there before breaking through at the 1959 Warsaw Autumn festival. His Threnody for string orchestra and the large-scale St. Luke Passion brought him international acclaim, though his first opera, The Devils of Loudun, never caught despite repeated reworking. By the mid-1970s he was teaching at Yale, and his style shifted - the first violin concerto leaned hard on semitones and tritones, a new geometry. He spent years building the Polish Requiem through the 1980s, expanding it in 1993 and 2005. Four Grammys, the Wolf Prize, the Grawemeyer, and the Wihuri Sibelius followed across three decades. He died 29 March 2020; his alma mater now carries his name.