Symphony No. 3 (Penderecki)

Symphony No. 3 is a symphony for orchestra in five movements composed between 1988 and 1995 by Krzysztof Penderecki. It was commissioned and completed for the 100 year celebration of the Munich Philharmonic. Its earliest version, Passacaglia and Rondo (which later served as the basis for the second and fourth movements of the complete symphony), premiered at the International Music Festival Week in Lucerne, Switzerland, on August 20, 1988. It was performed by the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and conducted by Penderecki. The full symphony premiered in Munich on December 8, 1995, and performed by the Munich Philharmonic, again under the composer's baton.

Symphony No. 3 exhibits a number of stylistic features which exemplify Penderecki's music of the 1980s, including motor rhythms, passages of free rhythm, chromatic scalar figures and emphasis on the minor second, dissonant intervals, and expanded percussion section. The work's dense counterpoint, innovative instrumentation, free harmonies, and complex rhythms make it stylistically similar to Penderecki's 1986 opera The Black Mask.

Early in his career, Penderecki was one of the key figures associated with the Polish avant-garde movement of the 1960s. Penderecki was interested in freedom from conventional aspects of music—namely meter, rhythm, harmony, melody, and form. Important works from this period, particularly Anaklasis (1959–60), Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), and Fluorescences (1961–62), were experimental compositions characterized by blocks of sound of varying dynamics, extended techniques on acoustic instruments, and tone clusters.

By the early 1970s, however, Penderecki began to move away from the avant-garde movement, claiming in an interview in 2000, "we pushed music so far in the sixties that even for myself, for me, I closed the door behind me, because there was no way to do anything more than I have done... I decided that there is no way that I can move on." Acknowledging that he had pushed the limits, Penderecki began to rediscover the neo-Romantics while working as a conductor in the 1970s. He specifies, "The kind of music I was conducting influenced my own music very much... During this time I began to have my Romantic ideas, partly because I was conducting Bruckner, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky." At this point in his career, Penderecki's music begins to feature melodic expression, lyricism, and dramatic character.

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