Antoni Wit - The Best of Antoni Wit (2024)

Veteran conductor Antoni Wit has been a major champion of Polish contemporary music but also has a wide repertory of music from many countries. He was conductor of the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Katowice, and then the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra for many years.

Wit (pronounced Vit) was born in Kraków, Poland, on February 7, 1944. He attended the Kraków Academy of Music (then the State Higher Academy of Music), studying conducting with Henryk Czyż and composition with Krzysztof Penderecki. After graduating in 1967, he went on to serve as assistant to Witold Rowicki at the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra while earning a law degree at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków in 1969. He benefited from relatively liberal Polish travel policies and was able to study conducting in Paris with Pierre Dervaux at the Ecole Normale de Musique and composition privately with the famed teacher Nadia Boulanger. Wit went on to attend conducting classes at the Tanglewood Music Center in the U.S. with Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and Seiji Ozawa in 1973. He then became the conductor and artistic director of the Pomeranian Philharmonic Orchestra in Poland from 1974 to 1977, moving on from 1977 to 1983 to the Polish Radio and Television Orchestra and Chorus. During this period, he began a long track record of conducting new Polish music, leading the premiere of Penderecki's Lacrimosa in 1980.

Wit became the conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, Katowice, in 1983, remaining in that position until 2000. With that group, he made his recording debut in 1988 on the Titanic Records label, backing violinist Roman Totenberg in concertos by Brahms and Karol Lipiński. In 1993, he led the orchestra in a cycle of Tchaikovsky symphonies for the Naxos label, and he has remained associated mostly with that label over his long and prolific recording career. Wit became the conductor of the Warsaw Philharmonic in 2002, remaining there until 2013. He was also the principal guest conductor of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra in Spain from 2010 to 2017, and he made numerous appearances as a guest conductor around Western Europe with such major groups as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Italy, and several top British orchestras.

He has remained active as a guest conductor and recording artist, releasing albums with many of the orchestras with which he has been associated. In 2022, Wit moved to the Capriccio label, leading the Rheinland-Pfalz Staatsphilharmonie in a recording of works by early 20th century composer Zygmunt Stojowski; he followed that up in 2023 with an album of works by 19th century composer Zygmunt Noskowski. By that time, his recording catalog comprised some 300 items, seven of which were nominated for Grammy Awards. Wit taught conducting for many years at the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw. ~ James Manheim