Throughout his early career, the Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994) made a living writing popular music for the radio and the theater under the pseudonym of Derwid. In 1954, he completed his Concerto for Orchestra; from this point on, his work as a composer of concert works remained unhindered.
Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra is dominated by its final movement, an
ecstatic passacaglia. The passacaglia form, which dates back to the early 17th
century, is founded upon a short melody in the bass line that is repeated as new
ideas based upon that bass theme are developed above. In the Lutoslawski, the
passacaglia theme slowly works its way, with considerable force and in a variety
of brilliantly shaped variations, from the background to the foreground. For
fifteen minutes, Lutoslawski's music expands and contracts - at times calming,
at other times reaching a series of excruciating peaks. The musical materials
fly through the air, tossed around with the ease of an expert juggler. Speeding
passages in the woodwinds run into gigantic brass chords - and then the music
dissolves, only to be reenergized as the entire orchestra takes up the
passacaglia theme.
"It didn't interest me as profoundly as it interested Bartók," Lutoslawski said of his use of folk tunes in the Concerto. "I used this kind of material in the Concerto for Orchestra because I was not ready yet to realize what I wanted." He was accused in the press of using folk materials to appease the Polish government: "It's not true at all... it was a sort of episode. It served as something that replaced what I was not able to do."
In the 1960s Lutoslawski entered into the avant-garde. His music became
halting, noisy, and - for the first time in his output - highly visual. Odd
combinations of instruments took the place of lush orchestrations; the textures
became quirky; sound mass replaced traditional climax. But the medium was still
a traditional orchestra; it was an attempt to reconcile the past and the
present. Somewhat later, all that he had been doing since the late 1950s started
to come together; everything he had learned was finding its way into each and
every piece. The result was a series of startlingly beautiful works, one of
which was his Piano Concerto of 1987.
The Concerto opens with softly whirling, fragmented wind lines; the strings
slide into the texture and the piano ventures in gingerly. Eventually, the
pianist becomes a great Romantic soloist, covering the expanse of the keyboard
and creating a kaleidoscope of colors. The orchestral part is otherworldly, like
Brahms or Chopin without bar lines; the music is freed from the normal 
constraints of traditional meter and pulse. "Each musician performs his part as
freely as if he were the only player: the rhythmic values serve only as a
guide." This is Lutoslawski unveiling a favorite 20th-century avant-garde
technique, aleatorism. Introducing an improvisatory element into the music,
Lutoslawski specifies a general tempo and notates pitches but not rhythm,
creating a randomly generated, texturally fragmented counterpoint. The composer
forces the piano to change its attitude over and over, transforming the music
from crystalline filigree to brilliant, gigantic flourishes of sound. The charged chromatic writing is colored by octaves in the piano part, making the
music seem deceptively tonal. The work's final movement - once again a
passacaglia - is a great elastic sheet of sound, bent and stretched like taffy
from one register to the other. The piano charges in and out of the orchestral
landscape, the passacaglia theme accelerates, and then it comes to a complete
halt - not with a final, declamatory chord, but a large, sweeping question
mark.
When Witold Lutoslawski died at the age of 81, there was a sense that something in the process of flowering had suddenly expired without warning. Far from being finished with what he had started, Lutoslawski's late works were developing into fully integrated, stylistically mature works of art, everything sounding new and fresh.
© andante Corp. April 2001. All rights reserved.
