Listening to Lutoslawski: Part Three
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| Proof of purchase. |
[Read Part One] [Read Part Two]
Sometime around 1988, Jennifer and I were spending regular weekends visiting friends in Atlanta. I usually managed to work in a trip to a music store. I was building my classical collection at the time, the standard stuff everybody owns, Beethoven and Mozart and Mahler and so on. I had started browsing the “modern” section for anything that looked new and interesting. I didn't know anyone connected to contemporary classical music. The internet was not even a thing back then. Couldn’t ask AI. I had to stumble around in the music on my own.
One weekend I stumbled upon a CD with a balding, aged man on the cover. Lutoslawski Conducts Lutoslawski. Philips. The Berlin Philharmonic. It looked like a recent work, only a few years removed from me. I had no idea who Lutoslawski was. I am fairly sure I could not have pronounced his name. But it was the Berlin Philharmonic which I knew well. A top-tier distributor. I gave it a try.
The man on the cover was the composer, conducting his own symphony. That was another reason for buying the CD. Though I own a few of these now, at the time I had no recordings of music conducted by its own composer. When I got home, I put the Symphony No. 3 on my living room stereo, and I was floored.
I did not technically know why. I did not musically understand what I was hearing but it sounded fantastic, like nothing else I owned. So I did what I do with most things that grab me on first contact. I obsessed. For weeks it was practically the only thing I played.
The weeks became years. Not one year has gone by since that I have not heard it at least once, usually more. Maybe over a hundred times by now. Maybe more. It is my favorite symphony. I do not claim Lutoslawski’s Third is the greatest symphony. That title goes to Beethoven or Mahler, depends on my mood. But this symphony is my personal favorite of all-time. (See my previous review of it in my Great Thirds post from 2010.)
He was still alive when I found him. I discovered and got to know him in the last six years of his life, at the height of his powers. How lucky is that? A couple of years after the symphony I picked up his Piano Concerto and think it is the best such work of the latter 20th century. There was also another work, Chain III, that intrigued me and those were most of what I knew of him during his lifetime. The rest of the catalog only came to me after he died in 1994.
I told this story once before, back in 2009. Seventeen years later the story is the same but some of what I said about the music has changed. You relate to music differently through time. Everybody knows this if they live long enough and listen to music. I’ve lived with this symphony for nearly 40 years and even in the last 15 my relationship with it has changed slightly. Like fine wine...as they say.
It would be years before I even read the word "aleatory." By then the sound had long since become my favorite. In Part One I quoted Lutoslawski describing composition as fishing for souls. Finding the people who already feel what he feels or are capable of it. He caught me in 1988.
Although a Part Four is still to come, this is the piece I have been working toward all year. Parts One and Two covered nearly fifty years of Lutoslawski’s music. This post covers thirty minutes.
A couple of years ago I discovered a YouTube video of it being performed by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. I love watching live performances of music I have only known on audio. It always gives me a fresh perspective. This one gave me a shock. All this time and I had no idea how BIG the orchestration actually is. Around 90 players, almost four times the size of Haydn’s typical orchestra.
It opens with an abrupt knock.
Four E’s, full force, from almost everyone in the orchestra. Triple winds, with piccolo, English horn, E-flat and bass clarinets, contrabassoon. Four horns, four trumpets, four trombones, tuba. Timpani and four percussionists. Two harps, a celesta, and a single piano played by two people sitting side by side. A full string section behind all of it. For nearly forty years all of that came to me through two speakers. I had been listening to an orchestra far larger than I realized.
In my amateurish understanding, the symphony is in two modes: orchestral and solo/ensemble. I would say the work is divided about 40% the former and 60% the latter. Which means it features multiple solos and different sections sounding like quintets and octets throughout the piece. This is a rich, complex composition where individual pieces weave in and out wonderfully with the grand orchestra as a whole.
After the knock the strings lay down a calming, sustained atmosphere. Flutes play inside it. Suddenly, horns. Other winds enter, everything erratic, except the strings, which hold steady underneath like soft bedrock. Watching it, the orchestra seems almost secondary to its own parts. At times it is a wind piece. At times it is a percussion piece. At any given moment most of the players are sitting still, waiting for the conductor’s cue. Though there are all sorts of sounds intermingled, some melodic, some not, everything is exactingly controlled.
In Part One I wrote that in the Dance Preludes each instrument keeps its own personality, the clarinet unmistakably a clarinet, the harp unmistakably a harp. That was 1955 and a handful of players. Here he does the same thing with a large symphony orchestra. He is the master painter with 90 colors on his palette. He uses them all, sometimes only the few each moment requires. And when they all come together it is grand.
I also wrote in Part One that after World War Two he never really indulges in excess again. His Concerto for Orchestra (1950–1954) was the last piece written for an orchestra quite this size. The Third is bigger still. Yet for all its size and ambition (and weirdness), the Third is never excessive or overly indulgent. It is audacious. It is surprisingly economical. Economy at enormous scale, which is a wonderful thing to behold.
Though performed as one continuous piece, the Third is actually in multiple movements. The first is a series of episodes which Lutoslawski wrote about in his program note for the symphony’s premiere: "Each episode is followed by a short, slow refrain. The third episode leads to a short, slow intermezzo which in turn is followed by the third and last refrain." (Rae, The Music of Lutoslawski, 1999, page 166) The refrains are those hesitant, wandering strings, and the four E's keep coming back to punctuate.
Inside that frame, everything is moving. The strings turn playful and percussion enters for the first time, more dexterous than strong. A piano joins in, at play with the horns, and the strings morph until something menacing yet flighty takes over. Then we are nested in winds. Bassoons. The four E's again. At about five minutes the symphony becomes the most orchestral it has been, then narrows to a bassoon solo. Repeat four E's. A new playful juxtaposition in the strings, and Lutoslawski starts introducing silence into a wonderfully rhythmic passage.
From here on there will be occasional moments where everything stops for a conductor-controlled moment before building up again. Brooding horns. A remarkable turn by the oboe. At a little over nine minutes the flutes sound like birds in a forest. When the strings return they are loving and supportive, a space for everything else to happen in.
In 2009 I compared his quiet passages to the end of Mahler's Ninth, "a vast, loving space," and called him a gardener of sound spaces. Watching it this year, I wrote down the same words. Loving. Space. I did not recall writing what I wrote seventeen years ago until I found it afterward. Yes, you can relate to music differently through the years but some things stay the same. So nice.
The movement is built to intrigue you without satisfying you. He used the same idea in the Second Symphony. It keeps setting something up and declining to deliver it. That also happens to be the story of how the piece was birthed.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra commissioned it in the early 1970s. Lutoslawski sketched it, then set it down, and left it there for most of a decade. Les espaces du sommeil, Mi-Parti, the Novelette, the Double Concerto, Grave, the whole back half of Part Two was written while this symphony sat unfinished on his desk. He had other commissions to deliver. He also had a problem. He wanted melody, a long singing line, and he did not yet know how to make one live inside the language he had spent twenty years building. So he waited until he did.
He went back to it seriously in 1981. That December, Poland declared martial law and Solidarity was crushed. It was a blow for democracy in his home country. Lutoslawski answered by refusing to take part in the official musical life of Poland. He finished the symphony during that boycott, early in 1983, the year he turned seventy.
At about twelve minutes the chimes arrive. Clear and pristine, and brief. They will come back at the end. Then the strings take over. They are featured directly now, continuous, in charge. The first movement belonged to the winds. The second belongs to the strings. Lutoslawski described the main movement as "based on a group of toccata-like themes contrasting with a rather singing one." The toccata themes are the strings flitting about, playful yet restless. The singing one is the melody he waited ten years to be able to write.
The ringing interrupts again, then the full orchestra returns, strings and winds and horns and percussion together. There’s the second great oboe part followed this time by a tuba, as spectacular as one of those can be, about halfway through.
At 16 minutes comes the passage that was the highlight for me this time, a magnificent harmonic structure building over a rugged undercurrent, the string basses digging in underneath. For years I assumed passages like this were twelve-tone, because they are clearly not random and they are clearly not melodic either. That was a guess, and it was half right. Lutoslawski was no serialist. These are twelve-note chords, the harmonic fields he worked out in the private notebooks I wrote about in Part Two. Every note is chosen. What he sets free in his music is time, never pitch.
Rae describes the Third as "largely metred." Conducted, coordinated, moving together. He sets it beside the Second Symphony, which I called more exploration than achievement in Part Two: "The Second has very little a battuta co-ordination, while the Third is largely metred; consequently, the Third has a greater sense of harmonic and rhythmic pace, while the Second was predominantly static." (page 177)
Pace. That is the word. The Third moves the way a 19th-century symphony moves, and that is why so much of it sounds romantic to me. Epic. Dramatic. Mahler-like in places. Almost sentimental. In 2009 I wrote that his lyricism was "captivating yet not in any way 'romantic.'" I was wrong. These past few years, especially since watching this video repeatedly, there is obvious drama here that is unmistakably the late-Romantic style.
In Part One I wrote that the Piano Sonata of 1934 was romantic without sentimentality, that it breathed in a way his later work does not quite allow itself to, that he had moved too far forward to inhabit it anymore. The Third complicates that. At seventy, after twenty years of building a language that turned its back on romanticism, he lets the warmth back in. On his terms, of course. Inside the new language. He goes right up to the line and stops, the same discipline I heard in the sonata earlier this year.
The strings can be so sweet and loving. Then they turn into a swarm of bees.
It happens twice in this symphony, and those two swarms are the most dramatic stretches where the conductor relinquishes control. A swarm turns out to be a perfect picture of what Lutoslawski does when he lets go. Every bee flies its own path at its own speed. No bee keeps time for the others. And the swarm still has a shape, a direction, edges. In a swarm passage each player repeats a figure at his own pace, slightly out of step with the players around him. Rae calls these "bundles" but it sounds like bees to me.
The first swarm builds out of a section where everything is flitting about, supported by the whole orchestra, until the bass drums pound and the strings start to buzz, at about 20 minutes. Suddenly we find ourselves jerked into an epic romantic sound, and it disintegrates into each part doing its own thing, in a sweeping time. Then at about a minute later the bees truly erupt. Everything at once. A shocking display the first time you hear it. It still moves me today. Every time.
And then, masterfully, right back into the romantic, the dramatic without kitsch. The drama builds to a furious height. It all falls apart. It comes down. It vanishes, until there is nothing left but barely perceptible strings. Listen closely. It’s mostly silence with the horns interrupting raucously, scattered, now and then.
Rae has a name for this. "The Third lasts some thirty minutes with an abortive climax much earlier (at seven tenths)." Seven tenths of 30 minutes is 21. I did not know it was designed that way until I reread that in Rae’s book. I just heard it vanish. And then I understood what the vanishing musically meant.
Watching the swarms, I noticed something about the conductor. He cues the swarm to begin and then he waits, looking ahead, getting ready for the next thing. The players own the present. The conductor is already somewhere else, watching for what comes next. Most of the time, in fact, even in the metred music, his attention seems to be one step ahead of the sound. Be ready. Because whatever is happening it won’t last long before something else takes over in this sonic wonderland.
At about 24 minutes the ending starts to emerge. You don't know it, of course. The strings settle into a motif they will not leave for the rest of the piece. Other instruments come and go, but often it is the strings alone. Silence returns, briefly. The winds handle it.
By 1988 the symphony had already been out in the world for five years. Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony premiered it at Orchestra Hall on September 29, 1983. The next year the underground Independent Culture Committee, Solidarity's cultural arm, gave it their prize. In 1985 it won the first Grawemeyer Award, an international prize by the University of Louisville. That same year Lutoslawski took it to Berlin and recorded it with the Philharmonic. Three years later that recording was sitting in a bin in a record store, waiting for someone who had never heard of him.
How freakin’ lucky I was to have found it and bought it in those desert years before the internet! It launched a lifelong obsession. I know every turn now. When I watch it I do what that conductor does. I am always a moment ahead, listening for what comes next. That is what a hundred listens does to you. The surprise is gone. Something else has taken its place.
The strings sweep into the final theme, a progression of chords that carries them back to the bees. This second swarm is different. The first erupted all at once. This one is assembled. The conductor brings in the right side of the large string section first, then a moment later the left, on his command. Two distinct phases of fullness, one half of the strings and then the other, built in a few seconds inside a larger piece.
Then the whole swarm stops. Instantly. Everything timed very specifically, and the oboe takes over yet again. The work sounds like a wind quintet, for a while, very soft and very quiet.
A little after 29 minutes there is a fantastic horn solo inside the string atmosphere. Then all the horns, the French horns and the rest of the brass, trumpet themselves up to a gorgeous and mysterious height. The strings rejoin. Building. The flutes become very prominent. Building. Rae again: "the Third accelerates through and beyond a metred climax." This is the arrival the earlier climax aborted.
The final theme returns, romantic, and gives way to a furious building of the entire orchestra. Slowing down. Dramatic. Romantic. Everyone. An explosive flourish, and the percussion drives down, down, down into four E's, from everyone.
Exactly as we began.
I may have found it on my own, but the world had already noticed. In 1985 the Third won the very first Grawemeyer Award, the new international prize for composition from the University of Louisville. In 1986 its first recording won the Gramophone award for contemporary music and the Koussevitzky Prix Mondial du Disque in Paris. As it turns out, it was that recording I stumbled upon in that music store two years later.
But the honor Lutoslawski valued most came from much closer to home. In 1984 the Independent Culture Committee, the underground cultural arm of Solidarity, gave the symphony its prize. He had finished the Third while refusing to take part in the official musical life of Poland. Now the unofficial Poland, the one that had been driven underground, was honoring it. Of all the awards he received in his lifetime, that was the one that meant the most to him.
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