Lutosławski | On Polish Music

• Different and Indifferent

Thursday, 7 February 2013 4 Comments

I was not going to write anything today, the anniversary of Witold Lutosławski’s death nineteen years ago. That evening, I recall going into a BBC studio in London and taking part in a quite substantial (45-minute?) tribute along with John Casken and Charles Bodman Rae. The following day, I was already scheduled to fly to Warsaw, where I was able to attend Lutosławski’s funeral just over a week later.

I have just experienced, however, a bizarre acoustic phenomenon, courtesy of Polish Radio 2 (counterpart to BBC Radio 3). It was a live performance from its Witold Lutosławski Studio, as part of the Lańcuch X (Chain 10) festival, of his Cello Concerto. Nothing strange in that, you might think. But this was an experimental rethinking by a group of seven Polish musicians in which the orchestral parts were shared between two pianists, two percussionists and two people involved with live electronics, and the cello soloist Andrzej Bauer. Bauer has long been a powerful advocate of the Cello Concerto (he performed it under the composer’s baton and his later interpretation on the Naxos label is among the best). Bauer has also been at the forefront of reinterpreting Lutosławski, notably in his Lutosphere project with the jazz pianist Leszek Możdzer and the DJ m.bunio.s. Here’s a sample of Lutosphere, based on the theme from the first movement of Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra.

On this occasion, Bauer played the straight man to the other five musicians. He played the solo part ‘as is’. Borrowing the titles of the two movements from the Second Symphony, the ensemble prefaced the ‘Direct’ Cello Concerto with a ‘Hésitant’ improvisation that excluded the soloist. This raised all sorts of questions regarding the meaning of the cello’s repeated indifferente D naturals with which the concerto begins. Instead, here there was a back story, as it were, in the shape of some 25 minutes of largely unrelated material.

‘Hésitant’ began with a sustained D, which disappeared after a few minutes. In a series of waves, with two main climaxes, the ensemble gathered pace, volume and density, then evaporated, plunged the registral depths and regained the heights some 20 minutes later in cloudbursts of excited activity. Much of this was treated electronically, along with prepared piano sounds and other percussive effects. On air, it wasn’t always clear where the boundaries lay between acoustic and electronic sound sources. The improvisation was imaginative and exploratory.

The soloist’s open repeated Ds emerged from the dying embers of ‘Hésitant’ and ‘Direct’ had begun – four minutes of solo cello. I was interested to hear how the ‘arrangement’ of the orchestral parts would work. This had been done by the composer Cezary Duchnowski, who had also prepared the ‘electroacoustic sound layer’. Sadly, at least over the internet, the experiment failed more than it succeeded. The main problematical area was how to match the precision and sonic impact of live orchestral instruments. Maybe it was better in the hall, but the ‘wind’ textures were often muggy and the ‘brass’ timbres consistently feeble.

The trumpet intervention at Fig.1 was anything but the ‘angry’ intervention of Lutosławski’s original. Subsequent brass interruptions, especially those at the end of the four Episodes, were plain limp, so Lutosławski’s concept of drama through music never properly materialised. Even the highly expressive coming together of cello and strings for the concluding passage of the Cantilena was timbrally mismatched. The fiercest interruption of all, at the beginning of the Finale, was without any bite, volume or density whatsoever. You can imagine, therefore, that there was no real confrontation as the Finale progressed, no rhythmic edge. I already feared that the hammering orchestral chords at Fig.133 would not do the job of crushing the soloist. They didn’t even come close.

I wish that I could report otherwise, as I was looking forward to this with great excitement. As I said, it may have been different in the hall, where the sound diffusion may well have created a much stronger impression of the arrangement. But it is surely not beyond the bounds of technological potential to reconfigure the orchestral parts – but not necessarily to ape them – so that the cellist has a real sonic opponent, something to play with and against. As it was, he was far more alone than the composer intended. Whether Lutosławski would have approved of this revised sound-world I’m not sure. In any event, I think he would have wanted it to have had more ‘orchestral’ impact and immediacy than was evident on air tonight.

Filed under Concerts, Lutosławski, Music Dissemination, Music post-1937, Other Festivals, Radio Tagged with Andrzej Bauer, Cello Concerto, Lutosławski, Łancuch X

• WL100/17: Notebook, 6 February 1959

Wednesday, 6 February 2013 Leave a comment

Lutosławski as parachutist

‘Emulating’ [lit. ‘Repeating’ after someone] is only worth it when what one does is even better than the model. There are obvious examples: Mozart and the Mannheimers, Bach and Pachelbel, Vivaldi etc.. One has to have great self-confidence to ’emulate’. If one does not have this, it is necessary to find things that have not yet been discovered. Today there are no great ‘synthesizers’, ‘blenders’, no material to emulate. What scouts, ‘advance troops’, ‘parachutists’ discover is slight material with which little can be done. Each must seek his own nourishment, condemned to ‘the poverty of avant-gardism’. He must be his own ‘parachutist’, and then also ‘occupy the ground’ himself.

‘Powtarzać’ po kimś warto tylko wtedy, kiedy robi się to samo lepiej niż model. Przykłady oczywiste: Mozart i mannheimczycy, Bach – Pachelbel, Vivaldi etc. Trzeba dużej pewności siebie, żeby ‘powtarzać’. Jeśli się jej nie ma, trzeba wynajdywać rzeczy jeszcze niewynalezione. Dziś nie ma wielkich ‘syntetyków, ‘zlewaczy’, nie ma materiału do powtarzania. To, co wynajdują szperacze, ‘szpica’, ‘spadochroniarze’ – to jest wiotka materia, z której niewiele da się zrobić. Każdy musi sam sobie szukać pokarmu, skazany jest na ‘nędzę awangardowości’. Musi sam być ‘spadochroniarzem’, a później również sam ‘obsadzać teren’.

Witold Lutosławski, 6 February 1959 [my translation]

Filed under Lutosławski, Music post-1937, WL100 Tagged with diary, Lutosławski, notebook, WL100, Zapiski, zeszyt

• WL100/16: Philharmonia Festival, 2-12.02.89

Saturday, 2 February 2013 Leave a comment

The Philharmonia’s festival to mark the centenary of the birth of Witold Lutosławski (http://woven-words.co.uk) is not the first time that the orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen have celebrated his music. They also marked his 75th birthday with a series of four concerts, although for some reason these were given shortly after Lutosławski’s 76th birthday, starting on this date, 2 February, in 1989. Very curious.

Lutosławski shared the conducting with Salonen and also gave a pre-concert talk. His works were Symphony no.2 (1967), Livre pour orchestre (1968), Cello Concerto (1970), Les Espaces du sommeil (1975), Double Concerto (1980), Symphony no.3 (1983) and Chain 3 (1986). Again, his music was partnered by that of 20th-century composers with whom he felt an affinity – Bartók, Debussy, Ravel, Roussel and Stravinsky – alongside works by Beethoven, Brahms and Haydn.

Filed under Concerts, Lutosławski, Music Dissemination, Music post-1937, Other Festivals, WL100 Tagged with 1989, Lutosławski, Philharmonia, Salonen

• A Brush with Lutosławski

Friday, 1 February 2013 Leave a comment

I’ve just been to Warsaw to celebrate Lutosławski’s centenary. I’ve returned with commemorative books, CDs, a pencil, a medal and a brush, with the promise of an IoS app to follow. More importantly, I’ve experienced an enlightening and inspiring five days with friends old and new, all gathered together by the music and memories of one man. It was a bit surreal: we were there, but he wasn’t, except in his music. I felt his absence keenly, even though it’s almost 19 years since he died.

Day 1 (Thursday, 24 January)

It had all been a bit hairy getting from Cornwall to Warsaw. Yesterday, I made it to Poole for a performance by Johannes Moser, the Bournemouth SO and Kirill Karabits of Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto. Moser is playing it a dozen times or so this year and his was a vibrant and alert reading. We also had a great discussion in a pre-concert event with Tom Hutchinson of the RPS (who had commissioned the work and was on the eve of its own 200th-anniversary celebrations) and I’m looking forward to poring over the score with Moser in the near future. But neither threats of snow and ice nor broken-down trains got in the way of my safe arrival in Poland today to snow and minus temperatures that back home would be regarded as a national catastrophe.

The pre-centenary concert was given mainly by the young generation of Polish and visiting artists in the Royal Palace, as the opening concert of this year’s Łańcuch X (Chain 10) festival built around Lutosławski’s music. There were fine readings of Musique funèbre, Grave (with Marcin Zdunik) and Paroles tissées (with the Dutch tenor Marcel Beekman) by the AUKSO CO under Marek Moś. A special treat were the readings from Paul Valéry, Henri Michaux and Cyprian Kamil Norwid by one of Poland’s most famous actresses, Maja Komorowska. She was in the very first Polish film that I ever saw, Zanussi’s Zycie rodzinne (Family Life).

An unexpected part of the evening was the presentation of a specially minted medal by the Witold Lutosławski Society not only to Lutosławski’s stepson and wife, Marcin and Gabriela Bogusławski, but also to about a dozen other guests. These included the Polish conductor Jan Krenz, long a champion of Lutosławski’s music, Polish writers such as Mieczysław Tomaszewski (who was at the PWM publishers when Lutosławski’s career really took off in the early 1950s) and Michał Bristiger. Both Tomaszewski and Bristiger are in their 90s and as sprightly in body and spirit as ever. Younger Polish writers also honoured included Danuta Gwizdalanka and the composer Krzysztof Meyer, whose joint two-volume study of Lutosławski’s life and music is being issued in a single, German-language volume later this year, and Zbigniew Skowron, whose editorial and archival work has done much to bring Lutosławski’s music and thought to non-Polish readers.

Non-Polish recipients included the German musicologist Martina Homma, the Russian musicologist Irina Nikolska, the American composer and author of the first major study of Lutosławski’s life and work, Steven Stucky, and two British writers: Charles Bodman Rae and myself. James Rushton of Chester Music accepted the medal as Managing Director of Lutosławski’s publishers, Chester Music. The following day, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Antoni Wit also received the medal on the stage of the Philharmonic Hall at the end of the opening centenary concert. The Poles are good at this type of recognition and we were all honoured and touched by the generosity of the gesture.

Day 2 (Friday, 25 January)

Today was the big day and a packed programme for the visiting guests. First stop was the Chopin Museum, where we were shown a recently purchased autograph of Chopin’s Waltz in F minor. Krzysztof Meyer inspected it closely.

The Director of the Chopin Institute Artur Szklener and the Senior Curator of the Chopin Museum Maciej Janicki were our expert guides. Janicki then took us through the interactive displays and artefacts installed in the museum. We could also glimpse a more recent tribute to Chopin in the shape of a giant mural on a nearby building. You can see the even more giant and infinitely less prepossessing national stadium on the other side of the River Vistula.

At lunchtime we moved across from the reconstructed Ostrogski Palace that houses the Chopin Museum to the ultra-modern facilities of the National Frederic Chopin Institute. We weren’t there for Chopin, but for a press conference to launch a smartphone app: Witold Lutosławski: Guide to Warsaw. As I write, it’s available only on Android; the IoS version is awaiting approval from Apple.

I was impressed, not only by the way in which the creators outlined their intentions – principal among the people involved were (from left to right above) Grzegorz Michalski, President of the Lutosławski Society, Danuta Gwizdalanka, Kamila Stępień-Kutera and Artur Szklener – but also how good the application looked. It’s been designed by the Kraków-based company NETIGEN and project-managed by a former music student Kamil Ściseł.

The app has English and Polish versions, numerous photos, spoken and written texts, and it guides the user through Lutosławski’s Warsaw, visiting over fifty locations. The team decided early on not to include music so as to keep the app manageable. It seemed from the demonstration to be both handsome and user-friendly and should prove to be a major source of interest to a wide spectrum of people around the world. It will be much cheaper for those with foreign SIM cards to use at home than on the streets of Warsaw, but it is designed to inform users who are following Lutosławski’s footsteps either on the ground or virtually.

From the press confeence it was on to Warsaw’s Powązki Cemetery, where Lutosławski was buried on 16 February 1994. Most of us had been there many times before, not least because there are the graves of so many famous creative artists in its grounds. Lutosławski’s grave is close by those of many other musicians. It was getting pretty cold by mid-afternoon and the snow had piled up. Earlier visitors had, however, cleared the gravestone of Lutosławski and his wife Danuta and it was already covered in huge wreaths.

There was little room in the space between the rows of graves to fit everyone in. Krzysztof Meyer adjusted the wreath ribbons.

Speeches were made by the President of the Polish Composers’ Union Jerzy Kornowicz and by Steven Stucky.

In the photo above, you can see (from left to right) Jerzy Kornowicz, Krzysztof Meyer, Martina Homma and Irina Nikolska. Below, Steven Stucky, Krzysztof Meyer and Danuta Gwizdalanka partly hidden, Mieczysław Tomaszewski, Martina Homma and Irina Nikolska (also partly hidden).

Being a little frivolous by nature, I couldn’t help noticing that the profile of the conductor Stefan Rachoń behind Lutosławski’s grave had been lent a certain Victorian air by the accumulation of snow.

I stepped the other side and was followed by Meyer through the snow drifts between the graves. I then took a final photo of Kornowicz, Stucky and Homma.

The major event on the centenary of Lutosławski birth was the evening’s concert by the Warsaw Philharmonic under Antoni Wit. It was an interesting and in the event a brave choice to open with a piece not by Lutosławski but by one of the younger generation whom Lutosławski helped with scholarships and other funding. Pawel Szymański (b.1954) is arguably the best-known Polish composer of his generation, but he’s been out of the limelight for some time, mainly finishing his opera Qudsja Zaher (premiere, Teatr Wielki, Warsaw, 20 April 2013). His new orchestral piece, Sostenuto, is characteristically oblique, slow-moving (initially) and demanding of concentration. Its main climax approached Lutosławski’s in intensity and it subsided in a similar fashion. Szymański dedicated Sostenuto to Lutosławski, including a brief reference to the latter’s Partita (which I missed) and ended with a veiled reference, also missed, to Brahms’s Piano Concerto no.1. Szymański remains as enigmatic as ever.

Wit’s performance of Lutosławski’s Third Symphony was solid and well-paced, even if it didn’t fully catch fire. The fireworks came with Anne-Sophie Mutter’s performance of Partita-Interlude-Chain 2 in the second half. This is her piece (These are her pieces?) and she gave them all the subtlety and passion that they deserve. The hall was packed and it was great to meet up again with friends like the conductor Wojciech Michniewski (who’s conducting the premiere of Szymański’s opera) and the pianist and composer Zygmunt Krauze.

Day 3 (Saturday, 26 January)

The official celebrations are over for the time being. I decided to stay on for a few days, and today I had two events. The first was completely unrelated to Lutosławski. It was a piano recital by the Hungarian-born, Polish-domiciled Szábolsc Esztényi of music by his friend Tomasz Sikorski (1939-88). Sikorski, a contemporary of Krauze, was one of the most original voices in Polish music, and his strong, repetitive minimalist idiom is as challenging today as it was back in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

This recital was being given in the old Królikarnia palace in south Warsaw, which looked picturesque under lamplight, surrounded by deep snow, but was pretty cold inside too. The cause was the launch of two CDs – issued by Bôłt records in association with DUX and Polish Radio among others – of music by Sikorski. Esztényi’s double CD also includes two of his own works (Creative Music no.3 in memoriam Tomasz Sikorski, 1989, and Concerto, 1971). There’s also Presence (2007) by Kasia Głowacka. The other pieces, by Sikorski, are mainly archival – Echoes II (1963), Antiphones (1963), Diario 87 – as well as his Solitude of Sounds (1975). The second CD is by John Tilbury, who plays his own Improvisation for Tomasz Sikorski (2011) alongside Sikorski’s Autograph (1980), Rondo (1984) and Zertstreutes Hinausschauen (1971).

The Bôłt series is a fascinating and inventive mix of archival performances and new interpretations and I’ll be doing a substantial survey of some of its repertoire – around ten CDs – in the near future.

Unfortunately, I was double-booked that night and had the chance to hear only two of the Sikorski pieces in Esztényi’s recital, including Sikorski’s Sonant (1967). I was immediately struck by the correlation between Sikorski’s remorseless, expressionless repetitions and the opening of Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto. I wonder…

I rushed from south to north Warsaw via the magic of the metro, which offered relief from the temperatures which were plummeting towards -21C. I was on my way to an informal supper party at Lutosławski’s house. Unfortunately, I got lost on the way from the Plac Wilsona station and was lucky to find other souls out on the streets who could direct me towards Śmiała 39. I recognised it immediately, although I’d not seen it in the snow before.

The giveaway was the relief plaque on the wall.

The house is now occupied by Lutosławski’s stepson and his wife, who welcomed us all inside with whiskey, wine and good food. It was nice to relax and to be back in this special place. At one point, we were led up to Lutosławski’s studio on the first floor (the lit window on the exterior photograph above), where I had spent three days exploring his books, sketches and scores in September 2002. The arm of the studio containing his desk and main bookshelves (by the lit window) is much as I remember it, whle some of the other bookshelves have been removed or replaced. Sadly, Lutosławski’s 1970 carpet that he bought in London is no more, revealing the clunky parquet flooring which he had covered over for acoustic purposes.

Day 4 (Sunday, 27 January)

Bitterly cold again. A morning trip to visit the newly opened gallery at the National Museum devoted to 20th-century and 21st-century Polish art. It’s really good. The Poles have developed such an extraordinary visual acuity, teamed with a range of symbolism (much of it socio-political), that every item has something intriguing and stimulating to offer. There was Leopold Lewicki’s sculpture Musical Composition (1935), which offered multiple cubist viewpoints.

There were several pieces by Władysław Strzemiński, whose unistic paintings so inspired Krauze’s music in the 1960s. His little piece Cubism – tensions of material structure (1921) was particularly striking.

The period since 1945 was represented by some socialist-realist pieces through to contemporary film and video. If you are going to Warsaw, do visit. I was most thrilled to see in the flesh again Bronisław Linke’s Autobus, about which I have enthused previously in these pages. Close-up (and you can get much closer to the artwork here than in most of the other galleries I go to), this is a stunning, visceral work that has lost none of its power to shock since it was painted just over 50 years ago.

After a family lunch with my friends, it was off to the Lutosławski Studio at Polish Radio for a concert by the Polish Radio SO conducted by Łukasz Borowicz: Lutosławski’s Little Suite in its original version for chamber orchestra, Penderecki’s Piano Concerto in its revised version, and Stravinsky’s Symphony in C. This is a lively orchestra, giving its all to two relatively minor pieces by the Polish composers (I’m afraid that Penderecki’s Piano Concerto is as vacuous and overscored a piece as it was when I heard its Polish premiere in the original version in 2002; others disagree).

Day 5 (Monday, 28 January)

I was back at Polish Radio this afternoon for the press launch of a book on Lutosławski by Andrzej Chłopecki, who died last autumn. It is subtitled ‘Przewodnik po muzyce Witolda Lutosławskiego’ and is available only in Polish. I’ll return in a future post to this rather special guide, to a new photo album and an 8-CD box set of archival recordings also published to mark Lutosławski’s centenary.

My final Lutosławski experience was in the evening’s concert by the Wrocław PO under its conductor Jacek Kaspszyk. The main item was Lutosławski’s Piano Concerto, played by Garrick Ohlsson, who won the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1970. He was still feeling his way into the piece (he’d played it for the first time just two days earlier, but every performer has to start somewhere!) and frankly there was no comparison with Krystian Zimerman’s magical performance in London with the Philharmonia under Esa-Pekka Salonen two days later. In the same way that the Philharmonia celebrations for Lutosławski are pairing him with two of his favourite composers (Debussy and Ravel), the Wrocław PO completed its concert with dynamic performances of Stravinsky’s Firebird suite and Ravel’s La Valse.

And so, as the temperature rose on Tuesday to a balmy 0C, I left Warsaw for London, thoroughly invigorated and grateful to friends old and new for five days of celebration for a composer who has been hugely important to me since I was a student.

Oh, the brush!

The Poles are so imaginative. The Adam Mickiewicz Institute, which along with the Institute of Music and Dance and the Witold Lutosławski Society has brought these events to fruition, decided to give a special present to its guests on Friday evening at the Philharmonic. It looked at first glance like an old-fashioned pencil box.

On opening it, there was a familiar, early photo of Lutosławski working at his piano.

Underneath, inside the box, was a pencil and a mini version of the brush in the photo.

What was it for, you may ask? Clue: Lutosławski worked in pencil, frequently rubbing out and correcting his sketches and scores. And he was a naturally tidy man and disliked mess… I remember seeing a brush on his desk when I was in his studio in 2002, so this resonated with me. What a brilliant gift to bring back home!

Filed under Born 1938-49, Concerts, Lutosławski, Music post-1937, Other Festivals, Visual Arts, Warsaw Tagged with Lewicki, Linke, Lutosławski Centenary, Smiała 39, Strzemiński, Tomasz Sikorski

• WL100/15: Thank-you note, 26 January 1993

Saturday, 26 January 2013 Leave a comment

When I was working at BBC Radio 3, I sent Lutosławski greetings for his 8oth birthday. In his characteristically courteous and meticulous fashion, he replied the following day. He was in San Francisco, en route to Los Angeles, where he conducted the LAPO in the premiere of his Fourth Symphony on 5 February 1993.

Filed under Lutosławski, Music post-1937, WL100 Tagged with Lutosławski, thank-you note 1993, WL100

• WL100/14: Lutosławski at Polish Radio

Monday, 21 January 2013 Leave a comment

Polish Radio’s new website Witold Lutosławski w Polskim Radiu looks like being one of the most interesting archival sources on the composer so far. There are audio files and photo galleries connected with Lutosławski’s work at Polish Radio in the 1940s and 50s as well as a host of radio interviews made with and about him over the years. The initial on-screen teething problems have now been sorted, although the promised English-language transcripts of some of the items have yet to materialise.

The contents are already of considerable interest, and I hope they will be added to in the coming weeks and months. Currently the contents include:

• over thirty radio reminiscences and interviews
• two examples of incidental music for Polish Radio Theatre unheard since the mid-1950s
• three photo galleries: Witold Lutosławski and His Time (52 items), From the Family Album (22) and Documents from Polish Radio (17)

For those who don’t understand Polish, the second and third groups above may be of the greatest interest.

Incidental Music

Polish Radio has unearthed two sequences of Lutosławski’s incidental music for Polish Radio Theatre. This activity was one which he pursued from the late 1940s until 1960. Little has been written on his incidental music because it was thought that it existed, if at all, almost exclusively in score form. Polish Radio has now released these two audio compilations from its sound archives.

The earlier of the two is called Anccasin ef Nocolette on the PR website. I must admit that I cannot rationalise the language nor find any source for this title. Martina Homma has identified the item as Okassen i Mikołajka, which seems linguistically more reliable. She dates the broadcast of this authorless text to 8 November 1954 (eighteen days before the premiere of the Concerto for Orchestra). Although the PR site gives the duration of the music as 5’39”, it lasts for 11’17”. The music is Baroque pastiche, the fragments up until 08’50” for harpsichord alone. Thereafter, a flute and violin join in. I wonder if Lutosławski was himself playing the keyboard. The recording is rather basic and the performance is not without the occasional fluff.

The second of the two sequences was broadcast almost three months later, on 30 January 1955. It was composed for one of the Arabic folk tales from Klechdy sezamowe (Tales of Sesame, 1913) by Stanisław Leśmian, who is better known by his first forename, Bolesław. The music for Zeklęty rumak (PR site), or O zaklętym rumaku (Homma), is more fantastic and richly scored, for chamber ensemble, than the frankly boring music for the earlier piece. It lasts for 10’27” (the PR site says 5’14”). Let’s hope there are more riches in the sound archives from Lutosławski’s prolific period as a composer of incidental music.

Photo Galleries

There are many unfamiliar items here, so these three sections present new windows into the past. The third section of documents is perhaps the least interesting as it draws on administrative paperwork from the post-war decade. The second section of family photographs consists almost entirely of old images of the Lutosławski family rather than of the composer. His likeness to his brother Jerzy and his father Józef is very striking.

It is the first section that brings Lutosławski really to life, with photographs dating from after the Second World War up until 1993. I was thrilled to see the sequence of photos from the rehearsals and concert for the full premiere of the Second Symphony, which Lutosławski conducted in Katowice in 1967. There are also black and white stills from the documentary film made by Krzysztof Zanussi in 1990 for the BBC (see my post WL100/13: In Conversation with Zanussi).

But for me it’s the first two photographs which I find utterly compelling. They were evidently taken during the same photo shoot (PR indicates that this was in January 1946) as another image used on the front cover of Polish Radio’s listings magazine Radio i Świat in April 1948 (see the top illustration in Panel 2: 1946-49 Music for Radio from my exhibition ‘The Hidden Composer’). Of these two new images, which are technically much better than the one reproduction that I found, it is the first which I find almost unbearably haunting.

Filed under Audio, Lutosławski, Music Dissemination, Music post-1937, Radio, Websites, WL100 Tagged with Lutosławski, Polish Radio, WL100

• Lutosławski Centenary Week in Poland

Monday, 21 January 2013 Leave a comment

I thought it might be of interest to show how Poland is celebrating Lutosławski’s centenary in its concerts over the coming seven days. I’ve drawn my information mainly from the official Lutosławski Year website, 100/100 Lutosławski. The site is now much more populated with events and information than it was when it was launched a month ago, so it’s well worth a visit.

Monday, 21 January 2013

Łódż
The Łódż PO’s January with Lutosławski festival begins with a talk by the President of the Witold Lutosławski Society, Grzegorz Michalski.

Tuesday, 22 January 2013

Łódż
January with Lutosławski continues with events around the String Quartet and the composer’s approach to the psychology of listening.

Warsaw
Concert by the National Philharmonic CO, conducted by Jakub Chrenowicz: Lutosławski Preludes and Fugue, Panufnik Violin Concerto (Isabelle van Keulen) and Beethoven Grosse Fuge (orch. Weingartner)

Thursday, 24 January 2013

Łódż
‘Sunspots’, a contemporary realisation of popular songs that Lutosławski wrote in 1957-63 under the pseudonym ‘Derwid’, by the composer and singer Agata Zubel and the cellist Andrzej Bauer, with electronics by Cezary Duchnowski and Ewa Guziołek-Tubelewicz. This looks absolutely fascinating, and if I weren’t scheduled to be in Warsaw I’d certainly want to be at this concert and the post-concert discussion.

Warsaw
Chain X festival (24 January – 9 February)
Opening concert by AUKSO CO, conducted by Marek Moś: Lutosławski Funeral Music, ‘The Sea’ from Five Songs (Roksana Wardenga), Grave (Marcin Zdunik) and Paroles tissées (Marcel Beekman), plus poetry by Valéry, Michaux and Nowid (Maja Komorowska).
Streamed live at 18.30 GMT on http://www.worldconcerthall.com via Polish Radio Dwójka.

Wrocław
Concert by the Lutosławski Quartet of Wrocław with Garrick Ohlsson: Lutosławski String Quartet and Bartók Piano Quintet.

Friday, 25 January 2013 – Centenary Day

Katowice
Concert by National SO of Polish Radio, conducted by Alexander Liebreich: Lutosławski Symphony no.4, Cello Concerto (Miklós Perényi) and Concerto for Orchestra.
Streamed live at 18.30 GMT on http://www.worldconcerthall.com via Polish Radio Dwójka.

Łódż
A lunchtime discussion on the Cello Concerto between the cellists Tomasz Daroch and Andrzej Bauer and the conductor Joshua Dos Santos.
Evening concert: Gershwin Cuban Overture, Lutosławski Cello Concerto (Tomasz Daroch) and Brahms Symphony no.2.

Warsaw
Inaugural concert of Lutosławski Year
National PO, conducted by Antoni Wit: Szymański Sostenuto (premiere), Lutosławski Symphony no.3 and Partita-Interlude-Chain 2 (Anne-Sophie Mutter).

Wrocław
Concert by the Lutosławski PO of Wrocław, conducted by Jacek Kaspszyk: Lutosławski Fanfare for Louisville, Piano Concerto (Garrick Ohlsson), Stravinsky Firebird Suite and Ravel La Valse. This concert will be repeated in Warsaw on Monday 28 January.

Saturday, 26 January 2013

Katowice
Concert by Silesian PO, conducted by Wojciech Michniewski: Lutosławski Funeral Music, Piano Concerto (Beata Bilińska) and Symphony no.3.

Łódż
Concert by the Lublin PO: Lutosławski Partita-Interlude-Chain 2 (Krzysztof Jakowicz) and Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances, with post-concert reminiscences of Lutosławski by Jakowicz.

Sunday, 27 January 2013

Warsaw
Concert by Polish Radio SO, conducted by Łukasz Borowicz: Lutosławski Little Suite (original version for chamber orchestra), Penderecki Piano Concerto (Florian Uhlig) and Stravinsky Symphony in C. In all the flurry of Lutosławski activity, we mustn’t forget that 2013 marks the 80th anniversary of the births of Krzysztof Penderecki (23 November) and Henryk Mikołaj Górecki (6 December).
Streamed live at 18.30 GMT on http://www.worldconcerthall.com via Polish Radio Dwójka.

Filed under Concerts, Lutosławski, Music Dissemination, Music post-1937, Other Festivals, Radio, Websites Tagged with January 2013, Lutosławski Centenary, Poland

• Gardner/BBC SO top Polish Radio poll

Sunday, 20 January 2013 Leave a comment

Yesterday afternoon (19 January), a Polish Radio panel chose Edward Gardner’s recording of Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra, with the BBC SO on Chandos, as its top recommendation for CDs of this much-recorded work. This was no ordinary ‘Building a Library’ type of format, however. This was an elimination contest based purely on listening, with no foreknowledge of who the performers were.

Radio Dwójka (PR 2) is Polish Radio’s cultural channel. Every fortnight on Płytowy Tribunał Dwójki, a panel of three sits down to debate and vote on the best recorded interpretation of a selected work. There is also a studio audience which gets its own vote. It’s an intriguing format, one in which the panel puts its reputation on the line. Last night, it consisted of the music critics and broadcasters Dorota Kozińska and Kacper Miklaszewski, and the conductor Wojciech Michniewski. Jacek Hawryluk was in the chair. Michniewski knew Lutosławski well, has conducted his music frequently, including sharing the conducting of Trois poèmes d’Henri Michaux with the composer on the 6-LP boxed set of Lutosławski’s music issued by EMI in 1978. He was a key figure in the Breaking Chains festival in London in 1997 and in 2001 recorded a CD of Lutosławski’s music on Accord. But I digress.

The schedule for yesterday’s ‘tribunal’ on the Concerto for Orchestra was as follows:

• Round 1: Opening of I ‘Intrada’
• Round 2: Opening of II ‘Capriccio notturno ed Arioso’
• Round 3: Opening of III ‘Passacaglia’
• Round 4: Continuation of III ‘Toccata e Corale’

After listening to the ‘Intrada’ from all six unidentified recordings, two were eliminated at the end of Round 1, then one more each round until two were left in Round 4. The results were:

• After Round 1: the two recordings eliminated were both of recordings by the Warsaw Philharmonic. The earlier recording was conducted by the man who commissioned the Concerto for Orchestra in 1950 and gave the premiere four years later, Witold Rowicki (Philips, 1964, first released on LP). The second recording was more recent, conducted by Antoni Wit (Dux, 2005)

• After Round 2, the composer’s own recording from 1976/77 was eliminated (EMI, first released on LP in 1978).

• After Round 3, Mariss Jansons’s new recording with the Bavarian Radio SO (BR Klassik, 2011) got the chop.

That left just two recordings. The panel had proved itself pretty much of one mind during the earlier eliminations, and so it proved here too.

• In Round 4, the runner-up was Jukka-Pekka Saraste’s recording with the London PO (LPO label, recorded live in 2008 at the Royal Festival Hall, London, released 2011).

• The winner was Edward Gardner’s recording with the BBC SO, recorded and released in 2010 on the first of Chandos’s much-acclaimed series devoted to Lutosławski (for which I’ve had the privilege of writing the booklet notes).

The studio audience also agreed with the panel about the top recording, but chose Lutosławski’s recording as the runner-up. While the panel preferred the three recent versions to the older ones, I was pleased to see that Lutosławski’s powerful interpretation still made an impact.

…….

If you’ve come across Hyperion’s recent release of Juliusz Zarębski’s wonderful Piano Quintet – played by Jonathan Plowright and the Szymanowski Quartet – you may be interested that Zarębski’s work also comes up before the Polish Radio 2 ‘tribunal’ in four weeks’ time, on Saturday 16 February. Of course, no-one knows if the Hyperion CD will be among those under discussion (my guess is that it will), but I’ll keep you posted!

…….

UPDATE! On 24 January 2013, Polish Radio 2 responded to this post with one of its own: Wyroki Trybunału komentowane w Wielkiej Brytanii (Verdicts of the Tribunal commented on in Great Britain). When I posted on the Tribunal’s deliberations on Zarębski’s Piano Quintet, Polish Radio 2 responded again: Adrian Thomas po raz drugi o werdykcie Trybunału (Adrian Thomas for the second time on the verdict of the Tribunal).

Filed under Audio, Lutosławski, Music Dissemination, Music post-1937, Radio, Reviews Tagged with BBC SO, Chandos, Concerto for Orchestra, Edward Gardner, Lutosławski, Polish Radio, Płytowy Dwójki Tribunał, Radio Dwójka

• WL100/13: In Conversation with Zanussi

Saturday, 19 January 2013 Leave a comment

On 19 January 1991, BBC 2 showed a one-hour documentary on Lutosławski. It was made by the distinguished Polish film director Krzysztof Zanussi. Witold Lutosławski in Conversation with Krzysztof Zanussi (1990) utilises excerpts from a BBC Omnibus documentary Warsaw Autumn (1978), filmed by Dennis Marks in 1977, as starting points. Zanussi steers Lutosławski through key moments of his life, interspersed with the composer conducting rehearsals or special recordings of excerpts of his music.

The results are mixed. At times, the premise is realised archly, as at the beginning, when the interview set-up seems rather self-conscious. At other times, Zanussi’s probing produces some interesting responses. Lutosławski recollection of his father is rather touching, for example, and his recollection of life in the 1980s (during Solidarity and then under Martial Law) fascinating. As always, he can be alternately open and guarded.

The interiors were filmed either in his downstairs sitting area (it’s open-plan) or in his first floor, L-shaped study (see my earlier post Lutosławski’s Carpet). The major musical extracts are from Musique Funèbre, Preludes and Fugue, Chain 2 (with Krzysztof Jakowicz) and the Third Symphony. Two excerpts from Witold Lutosławski in Conversation with Krzysztof Zanussi (amounting to the second and fourth quarters of the documentary) were uploaded to YouTube yesterday, so here are the links with a little commentary to each.

Excerpt 1

This section is concerned firstly with the post-war decade and socialist realism. Habitually, Lutosławski was extremely guarded about this period, as he is here, especially in the excerpt from the Omnibus film. The three-day conference to which Lutosławski refers took place in western Poland, at a place called Łagów, in August 1949. (Less than half of the members of the Polish Composers’ Union attended, rather than the ‘all’ that Lutosławski mentions.) Secondly (c. 7’45” in), the film shows Lutosławski accompanying a group of young children singing one of his children’s songs, Rzeczka (River, 1947). The final section (c. 11’20” in) moves the questioning of the relationship between the music and social-political contexts to the 1980s. It shows a fragment of Lutosławski’s speech on the first day of the Congress of Polish Culture in Warsaw on 12 December 1981. Overnight, Poland found itself under Martial Law.

Excerpt 2

This section concludes the documentary with a brief discussion of the return to democracy in the late 1980s and then focuses on the Third Symphony. There are two musical passages here, from figs 84 to 89 and from fig. 93 (Coda), in what appears to be a specially recorded session with Lutosławski conducting the Great Polish Radio SO (WOSPR) in Katowice.

Filed under Film, Lutosławski, Music Dissemination, Music post-1937, Politics, TV & Video, WL100 Tagged with Lutosławski, WL100, Zanussi

• WL100/12: ‘Breaking Chains’, BBC 1997

Thursday, 17 January 2013 Leave a comment

On 17 January 1997 the BBC began the second part of its Lutosławski festival, Breaking Chains, with three days of events at the Barbican Centre in London. It had been preceded by five days of complementary events at the GSMD. Altogether, this was one of the most concentrated celebrations of Lutosławski’s life and music.

The repertoire covered on 17-19 January 1997 included: Twenty Polish Christmas Carols (1946/1989), Straw Chain (1951), Concerto for Orchestra (1954), Five Songs (1957), Funeral Music (1958), Jeux vénitiens (1961), Trois poèmes d’Henri Michaux (1963), String Quartet (1964), Paroles tissées (1965), Cello Concerto (1970), Les espaces du sommeil (1975), Mi-parti (1976), Grave (1981/82), Symphony no.3 (1983), Chain 1 (1983), Partita (1984/88), Chain 2 (1985), Chain 3 (1986), Piano Concerto (1988), Interlude (1989), Chantefleurs et Chantefables (1990), Symphony no.4 (1992) and Subito (1992). When combined with the pieces performed by GSMD students, this list is remarkably comprehensive (of the orchestral works, only the Double Concerto was missing).

It was a tremendous week. I count myself lucky to have been there, and all praise to the BBC and GSMD for putting so many resources and such imagination into the project. We’ll probably not see the like again. The relevant pages of the programme are reproduced below.

Filed under Concerts, Lutosławski, Music Dissemination, Music post-1937, Other Festivals, Radio, WL100 Tagged with Barbican Centre, BBC, Breaking Chains, January 1997, Lutosławski

← Older posts

Newer posts →

On Polish Music

• Different and Indifferent