• WL100/33: Zanussi documentary (complete)

Saturday, 13 April 2013 Leave a comment

Krzysztof Zanussi’s 1991 documentary on Lutosławski has just appeared on YouTube, complete.  I wrote almost three months ago about two excerpts that became available there in mid-January (WL100/13) and I’ve reproduced that post’s opening paragraphs below.

“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.”

 

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

• WL100/32: Les espaces, **12 April 1978

Friday, 12 April 2013 Leave a comment

If you dip into any study of Lutosławski’s music that includes Les espaces du sommeil (1975, premiered by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and the Berlin PO under the composer’s baton on 12 April 1978), you will read that the text is by Robert Desnos (1900-45) and probably also that it comes from his volume of poetry Corps et Biens (Paris, 1930).  In fact, it had been published four years earlier in La révolution Surréaliste (June 1926), where his new collection of poems was printed under the title ‘À la mystérieuse’, a reference to Desnos’s lover, the singer Yvonne George.

Lutosławski’s source was actually a much later volume, a copy of which he owned and in which he also bookmarked poems by four other writers.  How do I know this?  In September 2002, I spent several days in Lutosławski’s house with permission to explore the contents of his study and attic store-room.  One particular book leaped off the shelves at me, figuratively speaking.

It was La poésie Surréaliste (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1964, repr. 1970), selected by Jean-Louis Bedouin.  The cover featured a drawing by Yves Tanguy.*

141-4164_IMGDesnos’s poem was the first that Lutosławski bookmarked (with paper strips torn, as was his wont, from an old notebook or diary).  The second was Météores by the Croatian Radovan Ivšić (1921-2009).  The third was a group of eleven short verses by the Anglo-Egyptian Joyce Mansour (1928-86).  The fourth was De tout repos by Pierre de Massot (1900-69).  And the fifth was Pierre de soleil (Piedra de sol) by the Mexican Octavio Paz (1914-98).

What immediately grabbed my attention and thrilled me was that the only poem that Lutosławski had marked up was Desnos’s Les espaces du sommeil.  Here was Lutosławski’s structural analysis of the text, complete with brackets, underlinings, circlings, Greek letters, a few translations into Polish and even some key dynamic markings at the very end.  He underlines or circles the two dominant refrains ‘Dans la nuit’ and ‘Il y a toi’.  He gives Greek letters α-ζ (another characteristic habit) to the subsections of the first two of the work’s three main sections.  He translates three words that he doesn’t know (‘charnus’, ‘essieux’ and ‘médusantes’).

15. La poésie Surréaliste 146-7 Desnos

Above all, Lutosławski is clearly captivated on these two pages by the text’s musical possibilities in terms of verse and refrain and the final climax.  How excited he must have been to find a poem which dovetailed so neatly with his symphonic preoccupations of the 1960s and 70s.

…….

* When I was in Warsaw in January this year, I was invited to Lutosławski’s house.  I learned from the wife of Lutosławski’s stepson that unfortunately this volume seems since to have disappeared.  If this is so, then these photographs, taken against a piece of Lutosławski’s blotting paper on his desk, are quite possibly the only record of this particular background to Les espaces du sommeil.

…….

I have written in a little more detail about Lutosławski and his approach to text setting in ‘One Last Meeting: Lutosławski, Szymanowski and the Fantasia’ (2007).

Filed under Literature, Lutosławski, Music post-1937, WL100 Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

• WL100/31: Notebook, 9 April 1969

Tuesday, 9 April 2013 Leave a comment

Lutosławski on Conducting (and Boulez)


If I accept a proposal to conduct my own works, this is not out of conceit.  On the contrary, it is out of modesty.  I do not have enough confidence that the most prominent conductors will ever take on the works of my last period (after Musique fun.) or, even if they do, I do not imagine that they will have enough time, inclination and independence from their habits to conduct them well.  Of course the exception here is Janek Krenz.  But he rarely has the opportunity to conduct my pcs now.  The surprise, however, contrary to what I wrote at the beginning, is that serious conductors have interested themselves so quickly in my Symphony 2 (Skrowaczewski, Bour).  So perhaps there really is no need for me to conduct?  I am tempted, however, to experience it for myself and prove to others that, e.g., Symphony 2 can and should be conducted as the notation stipulates, and not, e.g., as Boulez did in some bits. 

Jeśli przyjmuję propozycje dyrygowania własnymi utworami, to nie przez zarozumiałość.  Przeciwnie, przez skromność.  Nie mam dość wiary w to, że najwybitniejsi dyrygenci zabiorą się kiedykolwiek do utworów mego ostatniego okresu (po Muzyce żał.), albo jeśli nawet się zabiorą, to nie wyobrażam sobie, że będą mieć dość czasu, chęci i – niezależności od swych przyzwyczajeń – aby je dyrygować dobrze.  Naturalnie wyjątkiem tutaj jest Janek Krenz.  Ale on rzadko ma okazję dyrygowania moich utw. teraz.  Niespodzianką jest natomiast to, że wbrew temu, co napisałem na początku, poważni dyrygenci zainteresowali się tak szybko moją II Symfonią (Skrowaczewski, Bour).  Może więc rzeczywiście nie ma potrzeby, abym sam dyrygował?  Korci mnie jednak, aby samemu doświadzyć i innym udowodnić, że np. II Symfonią można i należy tak dyrygować, jak przewiduje jej zapis, a nie np. tak, jak to zrobił w niektórych fragmentach Boulez.

Witold Lutosławski, 9 April 1969 [my translation]

Screen Shot 2013-04-08 at 21.44.44When he wrote this, Lutosławski had been conducting his own music on the international stage for almost six years. He had shared the podium with Slavko Zlatić for the premiere of Trois poèmes d’Henri Michaux (Zagreb, 9 May 1963) and with Jan Krenz for the work’s first recording (1964).  He gradually increased his profile as a conductor during the 1960s (it was, after all, a useful way of increasing his hard-currency income).  He conducted the premiere of Paroles tissées with Peter Pears (Aldeburgh Festival, 20 June 1965) as well as of the Second Symphony (Katowice, 9 June 1967), followed by the second and third performances of the Second Symphony at the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ Festival (24 September, 1967) and again in Warsaw (16 February, 1968).

Screen Shot 2013-04-08 at 21.58.24The references to Stanisław Skrowaczewski and Ernest Bour refer to the facts that Bour gave the first performance of the Second Symphony outside Poland (Baden-Baden, summer 1968), followed by Skrowaczewski (Minnesota, 21 February 1969; New York, 3 March 1969).  Lutosławski conducted the seventh performance less than a fortnight before this diary entry (Uppsala, 28 March 1969).  Four more performances followed in 1969 (making a total of seven that year), two in 1970, four in 1971, and one in 1972.  The work seems to have fallen by the wayside for several years, reappearing once in 1978 and again in 1979, once in each of 1981, 1982, 1983 and 1984, and then languishing until single performances in 1989 and 1993.  That amounts to 26 performances during Lutosławski’s lifetime, one for each year since 1967.  It was long regarded as a weaker cousin to Livre pour orchestre (1968), although in recent years their fortunes seem to have been reversed and it is now Livre which is on the sidelines.  But that is a topic for a further discussion.

Screen Shot 2013-04-08 at 22.00.37Lutosławski’s confidence that other conductors would take up the Second Symphony went largely unrealised. Neither Bour nor Skrowaczewski touched it again during his lifetime.  The other conductors were Charles Groves (twice) and Paul Huppert (1969), Andrzej Markowski (1970), Konstantin Iliev (1971) and Matthias Bamert (1993). Jan Krenz’s name is not on the list.  All the other performances (bar one whose details are incomplete) were conducted by Lutosławski (data from Stanisław Będkowski & Stanisław Hrabia, Witold Lutosławski. A Bio-Biography, Westport CT, 2001).  His initial premonition proved correct, as he ended up conducting 15 of the 26 performances.

Screen Shot 2013-04-08 at 22.02.04The Boulez story is one of the oddities in Lutosławski’s career.  He had not finished the first movement of the Second Symphony in time for the scheduled premiere (Hamburg, 15 October 1966), in which the Sinfonie Orchester der Norddeutschen Rundfunk was conducted by Pierre Boulez.  The performance therefore consisted only of the second movement.  I’ve never heard a recording of this concert, so I cannot comment on Lutosławski’s little sideswipe at Boulez.  What is certain, however, is that Boulez has not since conducted any of Lutosławski’s music.  By any measure, given that Boulez has recently performed and recorded music by Szymanowski (not someone with whom I would ever have linked him), this is a strange not to say glaring omission.

The images of Lutosławski were taken by Jan Zegalski in Katowice during rehearsals for the premiere of the Second Symphony in Katowice in June 1967.  They come from Witold Lutosławski w Polskim Radiu (I posted on this fascinating web resource in WL100/14 on 21.01.13).  In one shot, Lutosławski is in conversation with Krenz, who had been his conducting mentor since the early 1950s.

Screen Shot 2013-04-08 at 22.03.28

Filed under Concerts, Lutosławski, Music Dissemination, Music post-1937, WL100 Tagged with , , , ,

• WL100/30: Notebook, 7 April 1960

Sunday, 7 April 2013 Leave a comment

Lutosławski on Cage


The bottom of this pot, from which we all draw, is already visible.  The zealous ones (Cage) have already scraped it.  As for me – I’m not particularly hurrying towards that moment, to which our history of music is unavoidably heading, i.e. the absence of all music.

W tym garnku, z którego wszyscy czerpiemy, już widać dno.  Co gorliwsi (Cage) już się do niego doskrobali. Co do mnie – nie śpieszę się tak do tej chwili, do której zmierza nieuchronnie nasza historia muzyki, tj. do braku wszelkiej muzyki.

Witold Lutosławski, 7 April 1960 [my translation]

This reaction to Cage, and what he stood for, was indicative of Lutosławski’s essentially traditional frame of mind, even when he was trying to break free of the past in early 1960.  What is strange about this comment is that only three weeks earlier Cage had had a liberating effect on Lutosławski’s music.  It has been known for a long time that Lutosławski heard a performance of Cage’s Piano Concert (1958) on the radio in 1960.  This chance hearing was a bolt from the blue for Lutosławski’s subsequent development, but commentators have never pinpointed the date.

Unknown-1
The broadcast details are contained in Danuta Gwizdalanka’s commentary on the Lutosławski Guide to Warsaw app (Routes>Warsovian>Saskia [sic] Kępa, Zwycięzców 39>’From (controlled) accident to accident’):

This event took place on 16 March 1960 at 10.10 p.m., when Polish Radio 3 broadcast a programme featuring the music of John Cage as part of the series Music Horizons.

 
Here is but one of a number of Lutosławski’s more positive public responses to Cage’s liberating significance:

[…] I heard on the radio a short fragment of John Cage’s second Piano Concerto [i.e., Concert for Piano and Orchestra].  The use of the element of chance opened for me a way to use a lot of musical ideas, that were kept ‘in stock’ in my imagination without any way to use them.  It was not a direct influence of Cage’s music, but the impulse, which enabled me to use my own possibilities.  So I wrote to him that he was a spark thrown on a barrel of gunpowder inside me. 

(‘Sound Language’, unpublished and undated typescript in English, included in
Zbigniew Skowron, Lutosławski on Music, Lanham MD, 2007, p.99)

 

 

 

 

 

Filed under Lutosławski, Music post-1937, Websites, WL100 Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

• WL100/29: Notebook, 6 April 1961

Saturday, 6 April 2013 2 Comments

Lutosławski and Poor Alternatives


I often see in my finished works only wretched caricatures of what were once their first concepts.

Często widzę w moich zrealizowanych utworach tylko nędzne karykatury tego, czym były w swoim czasie ich pierwsze wyobrażenia.

Witold Lutosławski, 6 April 1961  [my translation]

This single-sentence entry in his notebook reflects Lutosławski’s dissatisfaction at the very moment when he was racing to complete Jeux vénitiens.  He had finished the first movement the previous day (5.04) and would complete the final movement the following day (7.04).  The premiere took place in Venice less than three weeks later (24.04), but he immediately withdrew this version for a major overhaul.  The revised piece was premiered in full on 16 September that year at the Warsaw Autumn festival.  For previous notebook entries and commentaries on Jeux vénitiens, see WL100/18 (12.02.61), WL100/24 (11.03.61) and WL100/27 (19.03.61).

A comment on vocabulary.  I wonder if previous versions understate the intensity of Lutosławski’s comment.  In Lutosławski on Music (Lanham MD, 2007), Zbigniew Skowron translates ‘nędzne’ as ‘poor’:

I often see in my finished works only poor caricatures of what their first conception was like.

So too does Joanna Holzman in Lutosławski. Homagium, an exhibition catalogue published by Galeria Kordegarda (Warsaw, 1996).  Her version, despite the unnecessary insertion of ‘very’, is nicely succinct:

I very often view my finished works as poor caricatures of the original concept.

I pondered for quite a while on ‘nędzne’, because a range of Polish-English dictionaries gives a range of much stronger translations as well, of which the following is a selection: abject, abysmal, beggarly, lousy, meagre, mean, measly, miserable, paltry, poor, sad, shabby, sordid, sorry, squalid, vile, worthless, wretched.  It seems to me that ‘poor’ is the mildest of these.  It is quite likely that Lutosławski was feeling particularly frustrated and under pressure, sandwiched between the two days when he completed the outer movements of  Jeux vénitiens, just in time for the parts to be copied and sent off for rehearsal (which must have been an interesting event, as it was the first time any performers had encountered Lutosławski’s aleatory procedures and notation).

Of the alternatives to ‘poor’ I sense that ‘lousy’ (although overly colloquial), ‘measly’, ‘miserable’, ‘sad’, ‘sorry’ and ‘wretched’ are equally if not more suitable for his mood at this particularly stressful moment.  Are there any other views out there?

Filed under Lutosławski, Music post-1937, WL100 Tagged with , , , , , , ,

• Zubel Zings!

Tuesday, 26 March 2013 2 Comments

series_page_image_c_kopia tarasin jan_w238The Philharmonia’s Orchestra’s Woven Words celebration of the centenary of the birth of Witold Lutosławski has come to its end in London, although it is taking some of its repertoire abroad from time to time until September.  It has been an undeniable success, with great performances of Lutosławski’s music under Esa-Pekka Salonen.  I went to all three London concerts in the Royal Festival Hall, and the clear highlight for me was Krystian Zimerman’s superlative interpretation of the Piano Concerto in the first concert (30 January).  Jennifer Koh brought an exceptional intensity and drive to Chain 2 in the final concert (21 March) and Truls Mørk’s performance of the Cello Concerto in the second concert (7 March) was also very fine.  I wish I could be as enthusiastic about Mathias Goerne in Les espaces du sommeil, but his weak diction and exceedingly nervous manner were severe distractions.  The programming of Debussy and Ravel was inspired, especially the placing of Ma mère l’oye at the start of the third concert.  The performances of the French repertoire were, however, hit and miss: the complete Daphnis et Chlöe was riveting, La mer rather matter-of-fact, while La valse – the last piece in the series – went for absolutely nothing because of Salonen’s expression-denying, helter-skelter speed.

Less trumpeted were the complementary concerts.  Students from the Royal College of Music played a sterling role in this regard, in concerts on 4, 6 and 27 February and on 6 March.    There were also three events by young Polish musicians playing music of their contemporaries, though these events were barely evident in either the Philharmonia’s online publicity, which failed to keep up-to-date with some programme changes, or within the RFH signage itself.  This was a pity, and something of a discourtesy to the Polish side of the partnership (the Adam Mickiewicz Institute), which had brought fresh imagination to these supporting recitals.  (A full list of the Lutosławski and other Polish repertoire in the London concerts is given at the foot of this post.)

Kwartludium

The first supporting event in the RFH came before the second concert (7 March) and was given by the Polish ensemble Kwartludium (clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, percussion, piano).  The advertised repertoire of music by Wojciech Blecharz (b.1981) and Jagoda Szmytka (b.1982) was replaced by pieces by other Polish composers: Sławomir Wojciechowski (b.1971), Wojciech Ziemowit Zych (b.1976) and Dariusz Przybylski (b.1984).  Dagna Sadkowska and Piotr Nowicki began the recital with a performance of Lutosławski’s Subito, which the full ensemble followed with a ghostly ‘impression’ of the piece.  All three of the other works had great dynamism and instrumental imagination.  A fragment of Zych’s piece (in Polish: Stale obecna tęsknota) is available on the Kwartludium website: http://www.kwartludium.com/Zych.mp3.   This recital was an extremely rare opportunity in this country to hear Polish music written since 2000, and that in itself should give us pause for thought.  We are too wedded to the triumvirate of Lutosławski, Penderecki and Górecki.  There are not only many other Polish composers born before 1945 who are totally neglected in the UK, but also four decades of composers who now range in age from their mid-60s to their mid-20s and whose names are barely known, let alone their music.  Our concert repertoire – and not only with regard to Poland – remains more insular than we (are prepared to) recognise.

Cellotronicum and Cellonet

The second supporting event took place before the third concert (21 March).  The first part was given by Cellotronikum, comprising the cellist Andrzej Bauer with computer input by the composer Cezary Duchnowski (b.1971).  They gave the world premiere of For A.B. by Ryszard Osada (b.1972), followed by Duchnowski’s Broda.  In the second part, given by the Cellonet ensemble, Bauer conducted eight of his own students in Penderecki’s own arrangement of his Agnus Dei and in Octagon by the Ukrainian composer Lubawa Sydorenko (b.1979).  In both pieces, Cellonet was absolutely stunning, and you can hear the Sydorenko on the Cellonet MySpace site: http://www.myspace.com/cellonet/music/songs/lubawa-sydorenko-octagon-58524337.  This was music-making of an unusual order, and it is a measure of its quality that two of the eight cellists – Bartosz Koziak and Marcin Zdunik – have won the Lutosławski Cello Competition (in 2001 and 2007 respectively).  I heard Zdunik give an inspired performance of Lutosławski’s Grave in Warsaw in January and he told me after the RFH recital that he’s about to record the Lutosławski Cello Concerto, so that is definitely something to look out for.

El Derwid

The final supporting event, and the most neglected, came after the third Philharmonia concert and was held in the distinctly unsuitable Clore Ballroom (diabolical acoustics, nil atmosphere).  It was a reworking of eight of over thirty dance songs that Lutosławski wrote in the late 1950s and early 60s under the pseudonym ‘Derwid’.  For some unfathomable reason, the evening’s concert sheet failed to mention this rather crucial connection.  I’ve known the Derwid songs in their original recordings for over twenty years, but even I was flummoxed by the unexplained heading ‘EL DERWID’.  Had someone been reading Doctorow?  Was there some unknown Venezuelan bandit connection?  Subsequent research revealed that the ‘El’ comes from ‘Elettrovoce’, a duet comprising the composer and singer Agata Zubel (b.1978) and Duchnowski.  Somebody might have thought to explain this.  Zubel and Duchnowski (on piano as well as computer) teamed up several years ago with Bauer to perform their realisations of a selection of Derwid songs; a recording of this ‘El Derwid’ repertoire is due out on CD Accord this autumn.

Even though I caught only five of the songs (their performance must have started the minute the concert ended, as they were on song no.3 by the time I got downstairs), they were sufficient to whet my appetite for the CD.  Zubel has great stage presence and a wonderfully flexible voice.  In Czarownica (Witch), she and Bauer seemed to be having a domestic tit-for-tat, to humorous effect, while in Daleka podróż (Distant Journey) the trio brought a grating darkness to this tale of dreaming of distant, sunny climes.  In this bitterly cold March weather, I knew how they felt.  The title song for their set, Plamy na słońcu (Sunspots), delightfully and unexpectedly interlaced Derwid’s music with the Passacaglia theme from Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra.  Woven works.  This fringe event brought a smile to the lips of those who had found it, and it gave the festival a properly fizzing conclusion.

Postscript

Two further aspects of Woven Words are worth mentioning.  Firstly, and more importantly, the detail and skill that have gone into the woven-words.co.uk website.  It is a model of its kind: launched well in advance of the festival (three months), it contains links to several specially commissioned films and a series of essays on Lutosławski.  This is a very valuable resource, not just for the festival but for future readers and viewers.  Secondly, there was a Lutosławski Study Day – ‘Lutosławski and the Interior Drama: The Spaces of Dream’ – held at the RFH on 16 March. There were five sessions: talks by Steven Stucky (‘Glimpsing an Ideal World’), myself (‘The Spaces of Dream: Lutosławski and Surrealism’) and Nicholas Reyland (‘The Sense of an Ending: Late Music, Enduring Concerns’), plus a workshop on the String Quartet with Steven Stucky and the Jubilee String Quartet, who then played the work complete.  The day concluded with a panel discussion by the three speakers.

Woven Words: 20th- and 21st-Century Polish Repertoire

• Lutosławski/Philharmonia: Concerto for Orchestra (1954), Musique funèbre (1958), Cello Concerto (1970), Les espaces du sommeil (1975), Chain 2 (1985), Piano Concerto (1988), Symphony no.4 (1992)

• Lutosławski/RCM: Two Studies (1941), Bucolics (1952), Dance Preludes (1954), Jeux vénitiens (1961), String Quartet (1964), Epitaph (1979), Grave (1981), Mini-Overture (1982), Symphony no.3 (1983), Partita (1984), Fanfare for CUBE (1987), Subito (1992)

• Lutosławski/Kwartludium: Subito (1992)

• Lutosławski/Jubilee String Quartet: String Quartet (1964)

• ‘Derwid’/El Derwid: Cyrk jedzie (The Circus is Coming), Jeden przystanek dalej (One Stop Further), Z lat dziecinnych (From Childhood), Czarownica (Witch), Złote pantofelki (Golden Shoes), Daleka podróż (Distant Journey), W lunaparku (At the Funfair), Plamy na słońcu (Sunspots)

• Other 
Cezary Duchnowski: Broda (2005)
Ryszard Osada: For A.B. (2013?) world premiere
Krzysztof Penderecki: Agnus Dei (1981), arr. eight cellos (2007)
Dariusz Przybylski: Medeas Träume (2008)
Sławomir Wojciechowski: Rope of Sands (2009)
Wojciech Zimowit Zych: Ever-Present Longing (2005)

Filed under Born 1970-89, Electroacoustic, Experimental, Lutosławski, Music Dissemination, Music post-1937, Other Festivals Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

• WL100/27: Notebook, 19 March 1961

Tuesday, 19 March 2013 1 Comment

Lutosławski and Rain

In order to justify classical rhythmic formulae, the argument has been used that this rhythm (i.e. ‘harmonic’, based on pulse) comes from nature: walking, the heartbeat.  Well, it is not correct to say that other rhythms have no counterpart in nature.  In fact, natural phenomena proceed for the most part in an irregular rhythm.  Example: the rhythm of the drops as rain begins to fall (pizz., in b.67 presto (II) from Jeux v.).

Dla uzasadnienia klasycznych formuł rytmicznych posługiwano się argumentem, że rytm ten (tzn. ‘harmoniczny’, oparty na pulsacji) pochodzi z natury: chodzenie, bicie serca.  Otóż nie jest słuszne twierdzenie, że inne rytmy nie mają odpowiedników w naturze.  Na pewno zjawiska natury przebiegają w swej większości w rytmie niepulsacyjnym.  Przykład: rytm kropel, gdy deszcz zaczyna padać (pizz., w t. 67 presto (II) z Jeux v.).

Witold Lutosławski, 19 March 1961  [my translation]

This is a rare example of Lutosławski linking extramusical observations to his music, aside from his several references to the theatre.  The passage in question (in the second movement of Jeux vénitiens, which he was writing at this very time and would complete nine days later) is interesting from a number of points of view.

For one thing, the string pizzicati are almost completely covered by a denser, more active texture in the woodwind, brass, pitched percussion and harp, so hardly of foreground interest.  For another, this is not the first but the third such passage in the movement: the first is led off by the bassoon at b.9 and the second (more briefly) by vibraphone at b.46, both against a background of scurrying muted strings played arco.  In each of these first two cases, the ‘irregular’ rhythms lead to fuller textures in the wind and pitched percussion, and it is the second of these that eventually runs in parallel with the string pizzicati cited by Lutosławski above.

This third and most developed passage extends from b.67 to b.82 and is given to the strings for the first time and marked pizzicato to make the point (the orchestration of these three sections is a good example of how Lutosławski thought of his music’s instrumentation in structural terms).  Bars 67-82 take the form of an increasingly dense rhythmic texture that is interrupted by the playing of cardboard tubes on the strings of the piano at b.83 (see WL100/24: Notebook, 11 March 1961 for details of this passage).  Given the dating of both this diary entry and of his work on the second movement, it looks highly possible that Lutosławski did have the irregular rhythm of a natural phenomenon like raindrops in mind when he composed not only bb.67-82 but also the two earlier passages to which this pizzicato section is the successor.  Incidentally, the movement is not headed Presto in the published score – it simply has the tempo indication of crotchet/quarter-note = 150.

Here’s a recording of the (unrevised) second movement from the premiere of the otherwise revised and completed version of Jeux vénitiens, given at the Warsaw Autumn on 16 September 1961, with the National Philharmonic conducted by Witold Rowicki.  The bassoon entry at b.9 is at 0’05”, while the vibraphone at b.46 is inaudible, as too is most of the string pizzicato starting at b.67 (0’46”).

WL JV:II bb.64-72

WL JV:II bb.73-81

Filed under 'Warsaw Autumn', Audio, Lutosławski, Music Dissemination, Music post-1937, WL100 Tagged with , , , , , , ,

• WL100/26: Notebook, 13 March 1961 (2)

Wednesday, 13 March 2013 Leave a comment

Lutosławski on Electronic Music

It might be said that, in the works which I am now writing, the influences of electronic music are evident. Maybe.  One thing is clear to me, that electr. and concr. music realises, to a certain degree, timbral and rhythmic elements which from early on have imposed themselves on my imagination.

Mozna by mówić, że w utworach, które teraz piszę, widać wpływy muzyki elektronowej.  Być może.  Jedno jest dla mnie pewne, że muzyka elektr. i konkr. realizuje w pewnym stopniu elementy dźwiękowe i rytmiczne, które od dawna narzucają się mej wyobraźni.

Witold Lutosławski, 13 March 1961  [my translation]

Lutosławski, who was in the middle of composing Jeux vénitiens at the time, was not alone among his generation in the early 1960s in sensing parallels between his music and the new sound-worlds of electronic music and music concrète.  In 1960, the year of her Sixth String Quartet and a year before the orchestral Pensieri notturni, Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-69) made a similar observation: “I am struck by electronic music: it invents new sound colours and new rhythms”.

Filed under Lutosławski, Music post-1937, WL100 Tagged with , , , , , , ,

• WL100/25: Notebook, 13 March 1961 (1)

Wednesday, 13 March 2013 Leave a comment

Lutosławski on Feeling in Music

For the thousandth time: music does not express any specific feelings, it only constitutes the formal framework into which, during its performance, each person pours their own emotions, whatever they are. Hence a v. simple explanation for the tears of the Gestapo listening to Mozart.

Po raz tysiączny: muzyka nie wyraża żadnych określonych uczuć, stanowi tylko ramy formalne, w które przy jej odtwarzaniu każdy wlewa swoje własne emocje, takie, na jakie go stać.  Stąd b. proste wytłumaczenie łez gestapowców słuchających Mozarta.

Witold Lutosławski, 13 March 1961  [my translation]

Filed under Lutosławski, Music post-1937, WL100 Tagged with , , , , ,

• New app: Lutosławski Guide to Warsaw

Tuesday, 12 March 2013 Leave a comment

Unknown-1News has just come through that two of the three app. platforms (IoS and Android) are now up and running for the Witold Lutosławski Guide to Warsaw.  It’s available in Polish or English.  There’s a very helpful website which tells you all about this inventive app., which is one of the more unusual ways that the Poles have come up with to celebrate the centenary of Lutosławski’s birth.   I wonder what he’d make of it.

To obtain further information on the IoS, Android and Windows versions of the app., click on this link to Przewodnik po Warszawie.

Filed under Lutosławski, Music Dissemination, Music post-1937, Warsaw, Websites Tagged with , , ,

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