NEW YORK — Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, a conductor who defected from his native Poland in 1960 to take charge of the Minnesota Orchestra for the next 19 years, died Feb. 21 in Minneapolis. He was 93.
Mr. Skrowaczewski led orchestras in Europe and Asia after he stepped down from the Minnesota Orchestra, but he returned to it annually as its conductor laureate. He conducted what turned out to be his final concerts there in October, choosing Anton Bruckner’s majestic Eighth Symphony. Bruckner’s music had transfixed him since he was a boy.
R. Douglas Wright, the orchestra’s principal trombonist, recalled in an interview that Mr. Skrowaczewski, who looked frail in October but was vigorous on the podium, gave the musicians a speech after their final rehearsal, thanking them for keeping him alive.
“He wasn’t morose,’’ Wright said, “but I remembered saying to my colleagues, ‘He’s saying goodbye to us.’’’
Watching both concerts, Frederick Edward Harris Jr., who wrote a biography of Mr. Skrowaczewski, “Seeking the Infinite’’ said that there were noticeable differences in the way he conducted the Bruckner symphony from one night to the next.
“He was still searching, still trying to mold this sonic clay,’’ Harris said. “He was not satisfied.’’
Throughout his career, Mr. Skrowaczewski balanced conducting and composing, twin passions that came to him early.
Stanislaw Pawel Stefan Jan Sebastian Skrowaczewski was born in Lwow, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine). His father, Pawel, was a physician; his mother, the former Zofia Karszniewicz, was a concert pianist.
Mr. Skrowaczewski often recalled, rhapsodically, that as a boy he would sit beneath the piano at home and imagine that he was hearing an organ play.
He learned to play the piano, violin and flute, and began composing as a child, he said. Upon hearing Bruckner for the first time at 7, he was overwhelmed — and remained so for the rest of his life.
“I got sick from hearing his gorgeous music,’’ he told the interviewer Mary Hanson, the host of a public television show in the Twin Cities, in 2012, “paralyzed by the beauty and power of this symphony.’’ Studying scores by Bruckner, Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach inspired the composition of his own music, but he realized that conducting would let him lead great orchestras in the music of many other composers.
He told Hanson that composing and conducting were “completely opposite and disturbing.’’
As a composer, he said, “you have to be an introvert’’ and “forget everything else,’’ whereas a conductor “should be extroverted’’ to show off the works of composers.
In all, he composed at least three dozen orchestral and chamber works.
Mr. Skrowaczewski was a talented pianist as well, but any possibility of making the piano a career ended during World War II. In 1941, two years after the Germans invaded Poland, he was caught in a villa near Lwow during a German bombing raid. A brick wall collapsed on his hands, causing permanent nerve damage.
After the war, he began a decade at the helm of orchestras in Krakow, Katowice, and Warsaw.
In its review of his debut, The Christian Science Monitor said that Mr. Skrowaczewski’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 revealed him as a “leader of warm Slavic temperament,’’ adding: “His gestures are expansive and expressive, his conceptions highly dramatic and communicative. If his approach to the work was individualistic, at moments surprising, it proved exciting, human and convincing.’’
But life under communist rule in Poland was difficult. “It was impossible for musicians and composers,’’ Mr. Skrowaczewski told ClevelandClassical.com. “We couldn’t conduct whole areas of contemporary music, including Stravinsky.’’
He came to the United States in 1959 and was guest conductor in several cities, including Cleveland. He started relationships on that tour with the New York Philharmonic.
While he was in Cleveland, officials of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra — the original name of the Minnesota Orchestra — made him an offer to become its new music director, replacing Antal Dorati.
“The problem is he’s in Communist Poland, and he can’t say he’s got this opportunity,’’ Harris said. “They wouldn’t let him out.’’ But he had an engagement in Amsterdam that he was permitted to fulfill in early 1960. He and his wife, the former Krystyna Jarosz, packed two suitcases, leaving almost everything behind. They left Warsaw by train and headed west.
