The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • G6

arts BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Charles Dutoit, conductor With cellists Gautier Capugon, Daniel Muller-Schott, and Arto Noras Music of Ravel, Penderecki, and Elgar At: Symphony Hall, Oct. 31-Nov. 5, Tickets www.bso.org sive, pursuing a stylistic path that has always left listeners and critics continually having to reorient their expectations. During a post-Stalinist thaw in Communist Poland, he traversed the bleeding-edge of the 1960s avant-garde; a decade later, he began to adopt a thoroughgoing neo-Romanticism, regenerating the rhetoric of the 19th century. It might be a standard narrative young radical turns conservative apostate except that Penderecki's radical music was always more connected with tradition, and his conservative music always more radical, than the surface might indicate.

His music has continued to cross those two paths at varying angles. Consider "Polymorphia" and the Eighth Symphony: wildly different, written almost 50 years apart, nevertheless both looking forward and back at the same time. To paraphrase the medieval master Guillaume de Machaut, Penderecki's ends are and, for a long time, have been his beginnings. He has always been an inveterate traveler. For this article, Penderecki talks on the phone from New York, where he has just arrived after concerts in Beijing.

He will come to Boston by way of New Haven and a concert with the Yale Philharmonia. (Penderecki was a professor at Yale from 1972 to 1978.) After Boston, he will leave for Budapest. November brings the centerpiece of his birthday celebrations, a weeklong festival of his music in Warsaw. In December, he heads to Seoul. "Traveling, talking to people, and rehearsing, I'm always finding new ideas," he muses.

"If I stay in one place, maybe I won't have so many ideas." In the beginning, the ideas were purely sonic, unlocking the JANEK SKARZYNSKIAFPGETTY IMAGES An unending path Almost 80, composer Krzysztof Penderecki is still searching for new ideas By Matthew Guerrieri GLOBE CORRESPONDENT Krzysztof Penderecki composed "Polymor-phia," for 48 string instruments, in 1961. It pushes the strings' sonic abilities to modernist limits: squeaks, wails, mutterings, and growls, an idiom of noise and effects. The piece ends, however, with a grand C-major chord. "This was, of course," he recalls, "a shock for people of that time." But the tonality was al ways there, waiting to be revealed. "I started with a C-major chord, and worked back to the beginning I didn't want actually to shock, but for me this was a logical solution after all these very dense, quarter-step clusters, you know?" he says.

"It was the only solution at the end of this piece I could imagine." Penderecki composed his Eighth Symphony, for solo singers, chorus, and orchestra, between 2005 and 2008. It is largely tonal, Mahler-like, late- Romantic harmonies amplified and concentrated. The piece ends, however, with along, eerie upward glissando by chorus and strings, over which soloists intone poetry of Achim von Arnim: "The path is unending." It's an effect that would not be out of place in "Polymorphia." It's an effect, Penderecki is quick to point out, that he previously used in his thoroughly poly-stylistic "Polish Requiem." But it also is an effect specific to this text, the image of the unending path: the upward slide, Penderecki says, should "actually should be very long, like the never-ending glissando." Penderecki turns 80 next month; the Boston Symphony Orchestra is marking the occasion this week with performances of his Concerto Grosso No. 1 (2000), a brooding showpiece for three solo cellists and orchestra. He has garnered nearly every award and honor the classical music world can bestow.

And yet Penderecki remains elu- 6 THE BOSTON GLOBE OCTOBER 29, 2013.