Steven Stucky sat on the Warsaw jury of the Witold Lutosławski Competition for Composers, and was a world-renowned expert on the late composer's music as well as the recipient of the Lutosławski Society’s medal. In his 1981 biography, Lutosławski and His Music, Stucky traced the composer’s development from his student days to his rise in the 1960s as a leading avant-gardist. The definitive text follows how the ups and downs in his native Poland profoundly affected the composer's career, with detailed accounts of Lutosławski's dissatisfaction with the formalism of the late 1940s and the leading role he later played in the Polish modernist movement.
Witold Lutosławski at the piano, photo: Lucjan Fogiel / East News
Stucky wrote on his website:
For me, Witold Lutosławski was — and is — an artist worthy of comparison with Stravinsky, Bartók, Berg, Shostakovich, or Prokofiev. Like their music, his music embodies brilliant technique, vivid imagination, and largeness of human spirit. Like them, Lutosławski offers the willing listener at once both challenge and consolation, at the highest levels.
He continues:
Lutosławski’s music sounds beautiful — ravishing, in fact, in a kind of French-Slavic way that might remind you distantly of the sound world of Debussy, Ravel, and early Stravinsky. From early in his career, Lutosławski was a virtuoso at handling instruments to create magically colorful sound worlds. Moreover, in Lutosławski music sounding beautiful is not merely cosmetic, it is an essential attribute of the way the music speaks, of what the music “means.” The very sound itself is the heart of the matter.
In 2013, Stucky took part in the Woven Words project which involved 19 concerts around the world and filmed conversations about Lutosławski between Stucky and fellow composer Esa-Pekka Salonen.
During his own extensive composing career, Stucky won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2005. He wrote works for many major American orchestras, and worked particularly closely with the Los Angeles Philharmonic as their composer for 21 years. He also taught throughout his career at prestigious institutions such as Cornell University and the Juilliard School.
Sources: Stevenstucky.com, Cambridge University Press, Culture.pl, edited by AZ, 16 Feb 2016