Zbigniew Turski POL*21 July 1908 †14 February 1982

Zbigniew TURSKI was throughout his life con-nected with Warsaw, his native city, where he

studied composition with Piotr RYTEL and conduct-ing with Walerian BIERDIAJEW at the Academy ofMusic and from 1936 to 1939 he was a musical di-rector of the broadcasting station Polskie Radio. Allhis early compositions (among others SymphonyNo 1, Piano and Violin Concerto) were destroyed ina fire during the Warsaw Uprising. In 1945 he par-ticipated in the forming of the Baltic Philharmonicin Gdansk but afterwards he came back to Warsaw.He was a lecturer in the Academy of Theatre andthe Academy of Music in Warsaw, the president ofthe Union of Polish Composers (1957-1959), andfrom 1957 until his death he was a musical directorof the Contemporary Theatre in Warsaw for whichhe composed music for many productions. Mostimportant works: I Sinfonia da camera. Symphony No3, two violin concerti, ballets The Varnishing Day andTitania and the Donkey, micro-opera The Dialogues,film, theatrical and radio music.

Although it won the gold Medal in London in1948, his Symphony No 2 was only later subtitledthe "Olympic". It had been created simply as theSymphony No 2, its music dwells strongly in the in-terwar tradition characteristic, at that time, of refer-ence to classicism, but through its own emotional-ity it also refers to the symphonic style of late ro-manticism, albeit it is considerably more modern inrespect of used technical measures. In spite of thesuccess of the Symphony No 2 during the OlympicArt Competitions in London, a year later the com-position and its creator found themselves the tar-get of criticism from the authorities who sought toimpose Soviet style "Socialist Realism" on PolishArt. In 1990 the British record company Olympiapublished the record with his Olympic Symphony,using the archival recording by the Polskie Radio.

(WZ)

MusicGold Medal

JOURNAL OF OLYMPIC HISTORY 14(MAY 2006)SPECIAL EDITION 73