Ummagumma

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 m...

Lutoslawski looks admiringly toward his orchestra before he enthusiastically begins conducting. [ Read Part One ] In 1964, Witold Lutoslawski completed a string quartet commissioned by Swedish Radio for the LaSalle Quartet. He had the music. But there was no score. Not in any form the LaSalle Quartet could read, anyway. A conventional score, four staves aligned vertically showing what each player does at each moment, would have been, in his own words, false. Misleading. It would have represented a different work entirely. So what had he given them? The notes each player was to play. The figures, the gestures, the precise melodic content for each instrument. What he could not give them was a document showing how those parts aligned in time, because the alignment was the piece. The four players were to operate independently of each other, each at their own tempo, in their own rhythmic stream, converging at points the players cued for one another and diverging again freely in between. Wri...

Witold Lutoslawski. For rather random reasons, I made a New Year's resolution to devote 2026 to Witold Lutoslawski, one of my favorite “modern” composers. I have posted about him before (see here , here and here ). So I am working through his catalog chronologically, and this is a progress report through what I call “the first leg” of the journey: the early pieces up through and including his Concerto for Orchestra (1954). Lutoslawski was born in Warsaw in January 1913, the youngest of three brothers, into a family of Polish landed nobility. His father Józef was a political figure, active in the National Democratic Party, intimate with its founder. The family had estates. They had standing. Then the war came, and then the Revolution, and then the Bolsheviks arrested Józef and his brother in Moscow, where the family had relocated. Józef was executed by firing squad in September 1918. Witold was five. The family returned to newly independent Poland to find their estates ruined. ...

Under remarkable wartime conditions, this is the Leningrad premiere of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 on August 9, 1942.  To look at these people you would not know that all of them, without exception, are malnourished and under German artillery fire.  The orchestra itself fought fatigue to be able to learn and then perform the massive work of defiance dedicated by the composer to the city itself.   I recently completed Prit Buttar's excellent two-volume history of the Siege of Leningrad. I was struck by much in the books, but nothing of a non-military nature surpassed the extraordinary story of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony as described by Buttar in To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941-1942 . It's one of those intersections of history and art so improbable that it almost feels like myth, except that it happened among bombings, starvation, and bureaucratic terror. Shostakovich had already been through his own siege long before the Germans arrived. In the 1930s, Stal...

By ChatGPT. Usually, February is one of my least favorite months of the year. It tends to be cold, wet and dreary. There are not as many sunny days as January and I'm tired of winter by this point. Unfortunately, there are usually weeks of damp and chilly weather yet to come, so I seek extra inspiration in various ways. One of them is through specific pieces of music. I've already posted about how I relate to Ragged Glory , which helped me through a worrisome arctic blast in January. But long-time readers know I enjoy classical music most of all, about as far from garage band music as you can get. But that's me. With the start of each new year and throughout the duration of winter I find myself drawn to two symphonies that seem to capture something essential about this cold and troublesome but contemplative time of year: Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (see previous review here ) and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 (previously reviewed here ). Both these wor...