Andrzej Panufnik was born in Warsaw in 1914 and rapidly developed his career as a conductor and composer, before the Communists decried him as an alleged formalist and decadent artist. In 1954 he fled to England, where he was granted political asylum and with this status ceased to exist in official Poland. His international reputation steadily grew; he was awarded lucrative compositional commissions, principally from the United States, and increasingly felt at home in England. Leading conductors like Stokowski, Horenstein, and Solti performed his works. Panufnik always stood out in the compositional landscape of the ‘Free World’ of the West because he never associated himself with the methods of serial composition then both current and dominant. “For me music is always the expression of the deepest human feeling and genuine emotion. The spiritual and poetic content is therefore very essential and has a decided influence on the construction. In all my works I attempt to form a real balance between emotion and intellect – an equilibrium of heart and mind, of motivation and construction.”