Esa-Pekka Salonen, photo: © Ringo Chiu/ZUMA Press / Forum
The second month of Lutosławski Year 2013 builds on early successes of the composer's centenary. The Woven Words series opened at Royal Festival Hall in London on the 30th of January, for example, and the Telegraph's 5-star review hailed his music as "full of diaphonous, sensual appeal held under very tight control". Krystian Zimerman continued his performances of the Piano Concerto, with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic on the 15th and 16th of February. Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, having opened the year in Warsaw with conductor Antoni Wit, brings a recital tour to the U.S. in early March with pianist Lambert Orkis that includes the Partita from 1984. Upcoming international programmes put Lutosławski works in the context of famed Romantic-era composers – "making musical connections for the audience", as Maestro Wit said in an interview with Culture.pl.
Andrey Boreyko leads the Monte Carlo Orchestre Philharmonique on the 17th of February in Lutosławski's Symphonic Variations, to complement Schumann's Piano Concerto with Ingrid Fliter, the Argentine pianist who received the silver medal at the International Chopin Piano Competition in 2000. Conductor Jacek Kaspszyk, a superb interpreter of Lutosławski's music, travels to the U.K. with the Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra for concerts featuring the Little Suite from 1950, in Carlisle at the Sands Centre on the 21st of February and in Sheffield on the 22nd. Each programme sets the 11-minute gem of southern Polish folk themes distinctly: in Carlisle, with Schubert's Symphony No. 9 and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4, and in Sheffield, with other 20th-century pieces: Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2 and Mahler's Symphony No. 5.
The Royal String Quartet plays the Lutosławski String Quartet on a programme with Webern and Schubert pieces in the U.K., in Loughborough at Cope Auditorium on the 20th of February, at Djangoly Hall in Nottingham the following night, and on the 22 of February at Wiltshire Music Centre in Bradford on Avon. Their third disc of Polish works on the excellent Hyperion label is released on the 25th of February, pairing the two-movement, 25-minute Lutosławski piece from 1964 with the three string quartets Krzysztof Penderecki has composed to date.
The Cello Concerto
Another of Poland's top orchestra leaders, Antoni Wit, conducts Lutsoławski's fascinating Cello Concerto in Germany on the 21st to 23rd of February, a week after a Grammy was awarded to his latest recording with the Warsaw Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of Krzysztof Penderecki's works. In an interview, Maestro Wit discussed the issue of programming concerts, saying that, with the exception of an event such as the evening that Salonen leads at the Philharmonic in March and the exceptional birthday concert the Philharmonic performed with Wit and Mutter on the 25th of January, general audiences might find all-Lutosławski programmes "boring. I think it's a better idea to put it in connection with other music, when you think there are common points."
He gave examples from the Philharmonic's abundant concert schedule devoted to the centenary year. Łukasz Borowicz conducted Lutosławski on the 8th of February along with an overture by Witold Maliszewski, the composer's teacher, and Symphony No. 2 by Rimsky-Korsakov, who taught Maliszewski. The concert of vocal music on the 22nd and 23rd of February has tenor Ian Bostridge singing the composer's Paroles tissées, written for Peter Pears, the musical and life partner of composer Benjamin Brittain, whose Les Illuminations is also performed by Bostridge during the programme.
Maestro Wit's conducts the Cello Concert at Stuttgart's Liederhalle on the 21st and 22nd of February with soloist Johannes Moser and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra. They play again in Mannheim on the 23rd, then he conducts the piece in Portugal on the 2nd of March with the National Symphony of Porto and Brazilian cellist Antonio Meneses, gold medalist at the Tchaikovsky Competion in Moscow in 1982.
Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic also play the concerto on 21st and 22nd of February, with cellist Miklós Prényli, to continue the German orchestra's concentration on Lutosławski, who was a regular guest conductor there. They then tour with the piece to Essen, Germany, on the 24th of February, and play on the 27th at the famed Salle Pleyel in Paris.
The Cello Concerto, which Lutosławski completed in 1970 for the virtuoso instrumentalist Mstislav Rostropovich, is among contemporary classical music's remarkable expressions, both as a solo vehicle and as a volatile exploration of individual-group relations – a complicated topic to resolve in any era, and a seemingly intractable issue in the People's Republic of Poland when Lutosławski wrote the piece. The cellist's consistent opening D-naturals – marked Indifferente in the score - are met with harsh brass outbursts, begining a 20-minute interplay as theatrical as music offers, that is made even more so by innovative liberties the score provides the orchestra sections.
A Warsaw recital in early February during the Lutosławsi Society's Chain X festival rescaled the piece for cellist Andrzej Bauer, electronics and a piano-percussion quartet. But the mix through speakers ineffectively balanced between the competing voices, and Bauer's final steely passages struck like a reprimand to the re-created orchestral parts. In a post about the Polish Radio 2 broadcast on his blog On Polish Music, Adrian Thomas, whose forthcoming book is about the Cello Concerto, wrote that Bauer "sounded far more alone than the composer intended" during the performance broadcast.
Fitting the pieces
The issue of creating relevant programmes takes a revealing turn on the 21st of February, with the JACK Quartet's recital at the Indianapolis Museum of Art's Tobias Theater. They play the composer's String Quartet, which he scored as individual parts, not as a combined score showing each player the four parts. "The piece consists of a sequence of mobiles [...]", Lutosławski wrote about the work, naming a process he later termed "bundles", which proved crucial in his work. "Within certain points of time particular players perform their parts quite independently of each other..."
The JACK members met while at the Eastman School of Music. Experts in new music, they also commission fresh work from today's composers, such as guitar maven Elliott Sharp. Along with Lutosławski's piece - which can confound lovers of the string-quartet form as an art of dignified conversation - their programme has pieces by his important peers György Liget and Iannis Xenakis, and a piece adapted from early 17th-century composer Carlo Gesualdo and 14th-century music of Guillame de Machaut. The avid interest in early music among highly trained musicians has been a liberating factor for performance practise in recent decades. (Ancient music lacks performative expectations that restrict interpretation of 19th-century classical music, permitting intelligent musicians to engage with the score – not with a logjam of "definitive", often repetitive recordings.)
The two-month Woven Words festival in London, which began in the Royal Festival Hall at the end of January with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and pianist Krystian Zimerman's much-lauded concert, presents its Piano Music programme at the Royal College of Music Recital Hall on the 27th of February. Five pianists perform Chopin, Debussy and a Karol Szymanowski mazurka, along with Ligeti's Etudes and Lutosławski works including Two Studies, which the composer completed in 1941 and is among his few pieces to survive the war years.
Cellist Johannes Moser plays with Matthias Pintscher - a conductor and a composer, as with Lutosławski, Salonen and Penderecki - and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Glasgow's City Halls on the 28th of February. The Cello Concerto's exceptional vitality interacts with Romantic pieces: Weber, a Strauss opera overture and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7.
Major concerts in Chicago and Warsaw start the month of April. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra performs with Maestro Salonen and cellist Yo-Yo Ma on the 1st and 2nd of March. Ma, among today's acclaimed, acute popularisers of classical music, will bring welcome attention to the Cello Concerto's mysterious intensity, and Salonen also conducts work by Tchaikovsky and by Jean Sibelius, his fellow Finn and namesake of the music conservatory Salonen and fellow composers Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg attended.
At the Warsaw Philharmonic on the 1st of March, the annual Chopin birthday concert makes the appropriately provocative link between two piano concertos by great Polish masters. Soloists Peter Jablonski and Daniil Trifonov join the Warsaw Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, while the first of Chopin's two concertos, op. 11, joins a late Lutosławski masterwork, his Piano Concerto from 1988. Also on the programme is Venetian Games for chamber orchestra, the first piece he composed after a revelatory radio experience in 1960, of listening to John Cage's boundary-defying Concert for Piano and Orchestra.
With Venetian Games, Lutosławski began using aleatory techniques, adding "the possibility of free, complete, individualised instrumental playing within an orchestral ensemble." This creative blend of composed structure and free elements would, as he wrote, "open the door to the realisation of a number of musical visions that would otherwise remain forever in the sphere of my imagination."