Lutosławski: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
Witold Lutosławski was born on January 25, 1913, in Warsaw, Poland, then still a province of the Russian Empire, and he died there on February 9, 1994. The Piano Concerto was written in 1987 on commission from the Salzburg Festival. The first performance was given there August 19, 1988, by Krystian Zimerman, to whom it is dedicated, with the composer conducting the ORF (Austrian Radio/Television) Symphony Orchestra of Vienna. Zimerman was also soloist in the first performance in the United States, on December 3, 1988, with Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic. In the first performances by the San Francisco Symphony, in January 1993, Anthony di Bonaventura was soloist, with Lutosławski conducting. The orchestra consists of three flutes (second and third doubling piccolo), three oboes, three clarinets (one doubling E-flat clarinet and one doubling bass clarinet), three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, xylophone, three tam-tams, two bongos, four tom-toms, tambourine, bass drum, harp, and strings.
Between 1986 and 1993, Witold Lutosławski and the San Francisco Symphony developed a happy relationship. During those years he made three visits to San Francisco to conduct the Orchestra in his own music. Among the works he led was the world premiere of his Chain 3, commissioned by the SFS, and he was on the podium for the first performances here of the Piano Concerto he composed for Krystian Zimerman.
Stravinsky’s death in 1971 changed the musical landscape. He was the last survivor of the generation of Schoenberg, Ives, Ravel, Bartók, Webern, and Berg, and with him gone we found ourselves looking at a new constellation of senior composers, of whom only one, Roger Sessions, was born in the nineteenth century. Of those born before World War I and who survived Stravinsky, a handful will stand significant well into the future—Sessions, Copland, Dallapiccola, Tippett, Shostakovich, Messiaen, Carter, Britten, and surely Lutosławski. Of these, Lutosławski has the smallest catalogue, but his achievement comes closest to being unalloyed gold.
Lutosławski grew up in an intellectually and artistically rich environment, his father being a keen and informed musical amateur, his mother a physician, and his uncle one of Poland’s most eminent philosophers. The boy played the piano at six, started on his own to write music at nine, and then began to study composition with Witold Maliszewski, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov. He also spent two years studying mathematics at the University of Warsaw. He became an excellent pianist, also working on violin. His keyboard skills would provide him with a living for several years.
When he was still in his twenties, Lutosławski had become known in Polish musical circles thanks to the success of his Variations for Orchestra, introduced in 1938. During the war, he spent a brief period in the Polish army and a longer one in German imprisonment. Afterward, he found himself in trouble with the Communists. In 1948, Shostakovich and other major figures in Soviet music were hounded by their government for the sin of writing “formalist” music too much in the thrall of Western influence. The monkey-see, monkey-do Polish government of those years took the same tack, and Lutosławski’s Symphony No. 1 was the first composition to be banned in Poland. It was a wretched setback for the thirty-five-year-old composer, who now had to limit himself to writing music for films and radio, and arranging folk songs.
In the 1950s, the situation began to ease, and Lutosławski emerged on the international scene. His brilliant Concerto for Orchestra, first heard in 1954, attracted particular attention. 1956 was the year that Khrushchev denounced the Stalin era in the USSR; Poland, too, opened up correspondingly. Lutosławski was one of the founders that year of the Warsaw Musical Autumn, a festival that gave most Poles their first opportunity to catch up with what had been happening since the end of the war and which brought Poland into the mainstream of European music. It was soon after this that Lutosławski’s younger colleagues Tadeusz Baird and Krzysztof Penderecki began to be heard from. Lutosławski himself was in demand as performer, teacher, or just as a distinguished guest. In 1962, he came to the United States to teach at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood. It was the first of many visits.
In 1957, Pierre Boulez had published an article in the Nouvelle Revue Française with the title “Aléa” (from the Latin alea = dice). Ever since, the word “aleatory” has been a standard part of musical terminology, describing compositions in which some element of chance or unpredictability plays a significant role. Lutosławski was one of the most accomplished, thoughtful, and responsible of the European musicians to be drawn into this new aleatory world. As Poland became a culturally more open society, he became the leader of a group of composers influenced by the explorations of such figures as Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, John Cage, and Earle Brown.
Over the years, however, Lutosławski became less involved in what he called the “collective ad libitum,” though he continued to explore the possibilities of a harmonic style that is richly chromatic and divorced from tonality but which never had any connection with Schoenbergian serialism. He loved color and was a master of it, whether writing for full orchestra or a single instrument. He liked designs that proceed with a clear feeling of purpose and direction from loose to tight, sketchy to defined. This is vividly exemplified in the Piano Concerto.
The piano was Lutosławski’s own instrument. Once in the 1930s and again in the late 1940s, he abandoned sketches for a concerto. In 1975, he was on the jury of the Chopin Competition in Warsaw and was immensely stirred by the poetic and communicative gift of the eighteen-year-old Krystian Zimerman, who took first prize. There were some conversations about a concerto. Composer and pianist stayed in touch, and a commission from the Salzburg Festival provided the final stimulus. In 1987, Zimerman got the long-awaited work.
I was lucky enough to get to two of the first US performances, and what struck me especially was how unmistakably the new concerto, with its mature harmonic vocabulary, shimmering colors, and confident trek from quasi-improvisatory introduction to firmly set conclusion, sounded like Lutosławski, and at the same time, how profoundly, yet without sounding imitative, it was connected to the Romantic piano tradition from Chopin and Liszt, through Brahms and Rachmaninoff, to Bartók. The first and last of these are the most vivid presences. With his octaves, his widely spaced left-hand accompaniments, and his brilliant treble figurations, Lutosławski knows how to make the piano ring and sing.
The concerto is in four movements, though the music proceeds without break from one movement to the next. The first, characteristically, is an introduction or, as Anthony Burton has described it, an “extended upbeat.” We hear solo woodwinds in rapidly swirling figurations. Here too the pitches are prescribed but, though a few definite rendezvous are indicated, most of the ensemble is determined by the principle of the “collective ad libitum.” The sounds call Bartók’s “night music” movements to mind, but here the illumination is sharper. The piano soon responds with similar gestures. In contrast to what Lutosławski called this “nonchalant, light, sometimes rather capricious” material, the piano, seconded now by strings, introduces music in a broad, singing style. Bit by bit, the whole orchestra enters to take part, and by the time the final fortissimo arrives it has pushed the piano aside.
That climax breaks off on a note of suspense, and after a breath of only three or four seconds, the piano, accompanied by just a few long string instruments, begins the next movement. Here Lutosławski explores the nonchalant, light, capricious side of the first movement further in darting figurations of dazzling brilliance and delightful unpredictability. For a few moments the orchestral strings recall the cantabile aspect of the first movement. Then what Lutosławski calls the chase is taken up once more and the crackle of rapid sixteenth notes takes over again, though every once in a while the orchestra calls for “time out” in a series of soft, unmeasured chords.
It is for the third movement to explore fully the songful element. At first the pianist plays a rapturous, elegantly embellished “Chopin nocturne”—a recitative and aria really, instantly recognizable as such even though the notes are not those that Lutosławski’s nineteenth-century colleague would have chosen. The middle section of this largo is a dramatic dialogue between solo and orchestra, after which the movement ends in utmost quiet.
The finale is the longest movement (though not by much), and since its function is to settle the music, Lutosławski has chosen for it one of the most steadying of designs, the passacaglia, a set of variations over a repeated bass. This bass is distinguished by many long silences, and by the contrast between the detached notes at the beginning and the smooth legato in the last two and a half measures. The theme ends a perfect fourth above its starting place. This is of consequence, for the twelve variations that follow continue that scheme, starting at C and coming full circle, back to C. Though the harmony is not tonal, the bass suggests a certain tonal momentum, and this is part of what gives the music its forceful thrust toward its destination.
It would not be useful to describe each variation individually, but I want to point out three larger ideas. One: Part of what gives the movement its cumulative effect is that Lutosławski gradually fills in the gaps in the theme so that by the end the music is continuous. Two: In Lutosławski’s scheme, a new variation always begins in the middle of one of the bass reiterations. Three: Lutosławski breaks the predictability of his design by interpolating freer variations (the interlude for piano with bongos, tom-toms, and tam-tam is the second of these).
With the twelve-variation circuit from C to C completed, the coda begins. The music has already begun to speed up. The piano thunders in massive chords, the orchestral strings—once again not coordinated as to time—provide furious punctuation and underlining. The continued acceleration brings the tempo to twice what it was at the beginning, and the concerto rushes to its crashing close.
—Michael Steinberg
On Disc and in Print
On Disc: Krystian Zimerman, with the composer conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon) | Peter Paleczny, with Antoni Wit conducting the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra Katowice (Naxos)
In Print: Lutosławski and His Music, by Steven Stucky (Cambridge University Press) | The Music of Lutosławski, by Charles Bodman Rae (Omnibus) | Lutosławski Profile, a series of interviews with the composer by Bálint András Varga (Chester Music)