This is the fourth volume in Chandos’ series devoted to the music of the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski. Described by Gramophone as a ‘veritable dream team’, Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra perform Symphony No. 2 and the Little Suite, and are joined by Paul Watkins as the soloist in the Cello Concerto and Grave.

Classical Music

Lutoslawski was one of the great composers of the 20th century. Although he was imprisoned by the Nazis and subject to the whims of a communist government after the war, Lutoslawski's voice remained original and always provocative. This collection presents orchestral music and two song cycles from a period spanning nearly 50 years of the composer's long life.
Symphony No. 1 was written during the 1940s and is scored for a large orchestra augmented by battery of percussion instruments. The symphony is a work of shifting moods, animated by colorful orchestration. When the Communists took power in Poland they demanded that composers write music based on folk-songs. Lutoslawski's 'Silesian Triptych' written in 1951, meets the party's demands but rises above the genre with its sensitive vocal writing and genial Slavic flavor.
Olga Pasiecznik's warm soprano voice is perfect for the 'Silesian Triptych,' and she floats lovely pianissimo notes in the complex song cycle 'Chantefleurs et Chantefables.' The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra directed by Antoni Wit play this music with energy and technical proficiency.

Volume Five pairs two relatively early works of Lutoslawski with two works of his full maturity. The 'Concerto for Orchestra' of 1955 is a brilliant example of Lutoslawski's orchestral craftsmanship. It also demonstrates that he was a great composer well before he explored the more personal idiom of his later music. Also from this period is the tiny Overture for Strings of 1949. It is a lovely work that has been completely overshadowed by the composer's first symphony as well as the more famous 'Funeral Music.'
From the composer's full maturity comes his only work for chorus and orchestra, the 'Three Poems of Henri Michaux.' The score specifies that the two ensembles are only loosely coordinated, and each has its own conductor. The middle movement is a brilliant evocation of a crowd on the verge of riot. Finally there is 'Mi-Parti,' from 1976, a two-part single-movement work written for the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. As always in this series, the performances are completely competitive and offer much repertoire not available elsewhere--and all at a budget price.

Somewhat unusually, the fourth volume of the Naxos series of Lutoslawski orchestral recordings concentrates entirely on the music of his full maturity where the composer used brief passages of aleatoric counterpoint. As the composer stated many times, this is not improvisation: All the music is written out, but the precise coordination over a set duration is left to the moment. Thus each performance is, in its small details, literally unique. By the time of 'Livre pour orchestre,' written in 1968, Lutoslawski had begun to incorporate a certain amount of indeterminacy in all of his music.
The masterful Cello Concerto, written for Rostropovich in 1970, marked Lutoslawski's mature return to concertante writing. At the great cellist's request, only musical considerations were taken into account, hence the fearsome solo part. It is one of the composer's finest works, and is very well performed here. The 'Novelette' was also written for Rostropovich, this time as conductor, as a companion piece to the Cello Concerto in 1979. Finally, from Lutoslawski's last period comes 'Chain No.3,' the last of three works all employing a similar chain method of construction. All three works reflect the increasingly refined idiom of Lutoslawski's final decades.

Tremendous performances and recording.

With this second volume of Witold Lutoslawski’s orchestral music, we reach the third of an excellent series conducted by Edward Gardiner on the Chandos label.

The Symphonic Variations open an excellent 3 CD set of Lutoslawski’s Orchestral Music from EMI . This is the kind of set any fan of 20th century Polish music would have by default, and this BBC Symphony Orchestra recording doesn’t really replace it, other than offering stunning sound quality and remarkable detail. Lutoslawski’s conducting shows verve equal to that of Gardner, with the latter also generating greater extremes of mood, witnessed by a slightly longer duration compared to the composer’s 8:52.

The Symphonic Variations also open the Naxos CD, 8.553169, which carries the Piano Concerto. This is part of an excellent series conducted by Antoni Wit, whose Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra has this music under its skin. The recording is a little muffled and distant when compared to the Chandos version however, and the Symphonic Variations sometimes sound a little heavy as a result. Piotr Paleczny is a fine soloist in the Piano Concerto, but unless budget is a consideration the lack of detail in the sound discounts this version. More recent releases will provide sterner competition, such as Leif Ove Andsnes’s Shadows of Silence album which I unfortunately don’t have to hand. The last of Lutoslawski’s concertante works, the Piano Concerto is a marvel of quicksilver orchestral colour and conversational interaction between soloist and instruments which often appear in chamber-music contexts, but in music which can expand into the most romantic sounding and large-scale of gestures. Louis Lortie’s elegant touch is perfect for this piece, capable of stunning power but also reflecting the spirit of Rachmaninov and other greats in his feel for Lutoslawski’s personal but tradition-aware idiom. I love the balance in this Chandos recording, which makes the piano present and full, but placed in relation rather than in opposition to the orchestra. This width and depth of sonic effect makes for an extremely satisfying listening experience, and you can easily lose yourself in the piece’s sprightly intricacies and sometimes overwhelming passages of movingly expressive warmth.

The Variations on a Theme of Paganini was originally written in 1941 for piano duet, and Lutoslawski used to play this and other pieces with fellow composer Andrzej Panufnik, scraping a living as café musicians during the war years. The score was the only one of Lutoslawski’s to survive the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, and the version for piano and orchestra was made in 1978. Louis Lortie is witty and refined, and as a moment of light relief between the concerto and symphony this is well programmed. The Variations is a work of substance and more than a mere filler, but the character of the piece is geared more towards entertainment than experiment, and everyone responds to the piece with breathtaking verve and a palpable sense of fun in this recording.

The inspired Symphony No. 4 has appeared in excellent recordings such as the ‘original’ version with Esa-Pekka Salonen on Sony Classical, which should not be ignored. Comparing Gardner’s recording with the NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jacek Kaspszyk on CD Accord, and I’m torn between the sheer emotional impact of Kaspszyk’s massed forces, and the more subtly affecting feeling generated by Gardner’s quieter moments and instrumental solos. Hearing Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra has me discovering this piece all over again and sensing things I hadn’t experienced in other recordings. The opening for instance, is the most world-stoppingly beautiful version I’ve ever heard. Kaspzyk is easier and more natural in some details, such as the melting downward glissandi, and while Gardner creates marvellous sounds the Wroclaw brass remains unbeaten. Gardner generates more finessed intensity at certain moments, but at the cost of the sheer physical impact which Kaspszyk shows us the music can have. His winds wail and cry with chilling character, and the strings have a bite and intensity which always brings tears to my eyes. Gardner is also tremendous, but the rawness and sense of connection which generates such emotional turmoil in me with that other recording isn’t quite there with the BBC SO.

With a spectacularly good Chandos 5.0 SACD recording and the usual high production and presentation values this is a release which followers of Gardner’s Lutoslawski series and fans of good 20th century music should snap up without hesitation. You certainly won’t find anything lacking in any of the performances, and in all cases they occupy the top drawer when it comes to all and any of these pieces. My preference in the Symphony No. 4 for Jacek Kaspszyk takes nothing away from Gardner’s BBC SO achievement. If I hadn’t already encountered the earlier release I would be giving Chandos an AAA+ rating instead of merely AAA, but if this one work is something for which you have a special passion then I would urge you to seek out and own CD Accord ACD 161-2. The world is big enough for both.

-- Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International

"What most impresses and thrills me in Lutoslawski's piano output is his immense degree of creativity while heeding every detail with painstaking attention - his wonderful way of associating traditional forms with innovative, bold sonorities and structures, while managing to preserve a great degree of independence that makes this music sound effortless and lively" - Corinna Simon Witold Lutoslawski was one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. His well-known Variations on a Theme by Paganini for two pianos are in the repertoire of almost every respectable piano duo. Unfortunately, apart from the short piece An Overheard Tune, Lutoslawski left no other work for two pianists to posterity. During the second World War, Lutoslawski played many of his own compositions in cafes, in order to make a living. Whereas Lutoslawski's earliest compositions - the Sonata and the Two Etudes - are brimming with technical challenges for the pianist, the next pieces he wrote are cycles of brief miniatures in which he explores each note and each rest to attain a maximum degree of expression.

Witold Lutoslawski is one of 20th Century’s greatest composers. He is also a remarkable symphonist. The three works on the present release performed by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Hannu Lintu, represent three important stages in Lutoslawski’s career: his 1st Symphony, one of his earliest significant works; Jeux vénitiens was the first work in his best-known stylistic phase; and his 4th Symphony remained his last extensive work. Lutoslawski began his First Symphony in difficult times, during the Nazi occupation of Poland. At the time, he was making a living playing piano duos with composer colleague Andrzej Panufnik in the cafés of Warsaw. It is firmly rooted in Neo-Classicism but has none of the irony or stylization commonly associated with that style. Also, it makes no use of folk music elements, which frequently appear in many of Lutoslawski’s post-war works. The title of Jeux vénitiens alludes to the fact that the work was meant to be premiered at the Venice Biennale. In the end, only three movements were performed there in April 1961, and the final four-movement version of the work was premiered in Warsaw in September in the same year. Secondarily, the title alludes to the game-like nature of its aleatoric writing. The Fourth Symphony is a product of Lutoslawski’s late period at its most refined, characterized by a more nuanced and translucent harmonic approach than before, greater rhythmic clarity, a more straightforward approach and an expanded role for expressive melodic writing. These features stemmed in part from the fact that the importance of aleatoric sections was decreasing. In the Fourth Symphony, aleatoric counterpoint only accounts for about one fifth of the duration of the work. Conductor Hannu Lintu is an excellent advocate of Lutoslawski’s music. Hannu Lintu recently won the Gramophone Award for his recording of the Bartók Violin Concertos together with Christian Tetzlaff and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra.