Bolesławska, Beata Richard J. Reisner (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 531 attract major international talents (pp. 99–100). Tomoff argues persuasively that these musical competitions played an important role in an increasingly ‘globally homogenized musical performance style’, particularly in terms of repertoire and judging (p. 109), in the same way that tours by such virtuosi as Oistrakh and recording projects with Western orchestras contributed to the standardization of global orchestral sound (p. 140). Given the centrality of the notion of competition, the book conspicuously lacks a definition and an assessment of this concept and its problematic status within a socialist state based on Marxist-Leninist ideology and egalitarianism. For such things the reader would have to refer to publications by the Cold War Research Group of the University of Helsinki, notably Competition in Socialist Society edited by Katalin Miklóssy and Melanie Ilic (Abingdon, 2014). As for the musical lens, Simo Mikkonen’s ‘Winning Hearts and Minds? Soviet Music in the Cold War Struggle against the West’ in Twentieth Century Music and Politics (ed. Pauline Fairclough, Farnham, 2013) offers a comparable overview of Cold War musical/cultural exchanges between the Soviet Union and the West which, although it contains less archival work, extends beyond 1958 and thus complements Tomoff’s work, particularly in the case of Sviatoslav Richter’s conspicuous absence from foreign tours in the 1950s. Throughout the book such threads, as well as some of the ideas in the introduction, are rather hastily drawn together by means of such hindsightfilled conclusions as: ‘The seeds of the eventual Soviet collapse were already planted, even at the Soviet high-water mark of the late 1950s’ (p. 3, and paraphrased elsewhere). Still, and despite an under-representation of ‘Soviet Music’ as compared to ‘Imperial Competition’, this is a book full of valuable archival references, and one that should certainly prove instructive to anyone interested in what was cooking in the Soviet cultural kitchen during the 1950s. Department of Music, Université Paris Sorbonne Michelle Assay and Department of Russian/Slavonic Studies, University of Sheffield Bolesławska, Beata. The Life and Works of Andrzej Panufnik (1914–1991). Translated by Richard J. Reisner. Ashgate, Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2015. xiii + 335 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Figures. Notes. Bibliographies. Chronological list of compositions. Index. £70.00. Sir Andrzej Panufnik, the Polish-born composer who lived in Britain for nearlyhalfhislife,hasenduredalongwaitforanEnglish-languagemonograph, though excellent chapters were devoted to him in Bernard Jacobson’s A Polish Renaissance (London, 1996) and Adrian Thomas’s Polish Music since SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 532 Szymanowski (Cambridge, 2005). To these, Beata Bolesławska’s volume, first published in Polish in 2001, adds a full account of the composer’s life and, as well as commenting on the works as they occur chronologically, supplies three chapters of analysis of a handful of the later works. Panufnik studied at Warsaw Conservatoire, learned conducting with Weingartner, experienced brief pre-eminence in the Communist era, and found eventual serenity in exile in Twickenham — a remarkable story engagingly told in his autobiography, published in English in 1987. His style was lightly ironic and self-effacing, but Bolesławska contributes a wealth of additional detail to the story. Her opening chapters supply exhaustive information on Panufnik’s route to composition via piano, percussion, aircraft design and conducting. His entire oeuvre up to 1945 was destroyed that year (not by the Nazis, but by a decluttering philistine), whereupon he found himself a respected composer with no extant work. He successfully resurrected three early works from memory; perhaps their systematic construction facilitated the feat. Otherwise, apart from a sound-recording of a cabaret song, we have no first-hand evidence of pre-1945 Panufnik. Bolesławska has gathered a large dossier of press reviews, a vivid glimpse of the lost world of Warsaw’s musical life in the late 1930s. Panufnik’s prominence in post-war Communist Poland may surprise us. Though his portfolio was small, and his most original works never secure in their state approval (Bolesławska is excellent at evoking the caprice as well as the malice of the monitors of ‘socrealism’), his state-sponsored works allowed him a favoured position. However, he found the political pressure unbearable, and Bolesławska’s documentation underlines...