BBCSSO/Volkov szymanowski/lutoslawski 17/01/13 19:30 HRS

[jayne lee wilson]

Sparkling and exotic wintry flavours from Poland!

No, not a new icecream, but a concert framed by early and late orchestral masterpieces by Lutoslawski, the 4th Symphony and the Concerto for Orchestra.
2 mythically-rich song-cycles from Szymanowski in between...

Beautifully planned, what?

[RobertLeDiable]

Brilliant performances of these pieces. And what a stunning concert finisher the Concerto for Orchestra is - superbly played tonight.

[ahinton]

Sparkling and exotic wintry flavours from Poland!

No, not a new icecream, but a concert framed by early and late orchestral masterpieces by Lutoslawski, the 4th Symphony and the Concerto for Orchestra.
2 mythically-rich song-cycles from Szymanowski in between...

Beautifully planned, what?

Agreed in every particular! Indeed, the very thought of those two composers is almost enough to make one feel as though they alone are a massive credit to Poland!

[ahinton]

Brilliant performances of these pieces. And what a stunning concert finisher the Concerto for Orchestra is - superbly played tonight.

It's always been one of WL's most popular pieces but with every good reason. The utterly silly comment that I heard from the announcer afterwards about how listening to Cage's Piano Concerto then changed WL's entire outlook beggars belief; did it have some effect? - well, yes - but did it result in some kind of volte-face? - not abit of it! WL's persona as a musician was already far too well developed for that to be so much as the slightest possibility and, let's face it, the opening measures of his Fourth Symphony show his continued indebtedness to Szymanowski as almost to sound as though KS had actually written them!

[johnb]

I'll have to catch up with this concert via iPlayer but thought it worth mentioning that the WL symphonies, together with other WL pieces, are being broadcast next week in the afternoons. The performances are by Gardner with the BBC SO and I seem to remember their Chandos recordings of the symphonies was favourably reviewed on CDR a few months ago.

[Flosshilde]

A small but very enthusiastic audience. The two groups of songs were luscious, although I found it difficult to get the sense of there being any words - just sounds. Perhaps Polish tends to blur when its sung? The Concerto for Orchestra was as exciting to watch as it was to listen to.

The SSO is doing a series of concerts featuring Polish composers, especially Lutoslawski & Szymanowski. Apparently they were the first Western orchestra to perform in Poland after martial law was lifted in 1984, under their new conductor Jerzy Maksymiuk who had been the Principal Conductor of the Polish Chamber Orchestra & the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.

[jayne lee wilson]

BBCSSO/Volkov/Lutoslawski/Szymanowski/City Halls, Glasgow

Concerto for Orchestra
Like a sci-fi flick with spectacular special effects but little plot and less character, the Concerto is a showy entertainment; each vivid scene soon crossfades into the next, leaving images, not messages, in the memory. Volkov and the BBCSSO were brilliant in its projections, but (as broadcast) the size of the hall rather cramped the display, precise but too dry. How I longed for more space, inner and outer. This was DVD rather than blu-ray.

Symphony No.4
First in the programme, last in composition... does No.4 have anything to say to the Concerto? A need for economy of means, a distrust of grand gesture? But also a return to a more flowing melodic style of a kind wilfully, gleefully lost to the violence, fragmentation and aleatorism of Luto's 1960s and 1970s output. Build-up, arrival, climax - all here; but wasn't that definitively done in No.3? Is No.4 now questioning and undermining even the reinvented rhetoric of that "masterpiece"? Luto casts an eye over his oeuvre, suspicious of the very concept of Great Works, and sews together a brief succession of signatures: the hovering and singing strings, the scalic, spidery fragments of wind, wisps and bursts of percussion, the climax-which-isn't... are they all phantoms? The last outburst - not anger, not joy - it's just over, that's it. Oh, enough!

"I would like to write as if I had remained silent" said the poet Pilinszky, and I often think Lutoslawski might have felt the same. In his symphonic music, the tension between post-romantic rhetoric and compressed intensity, between saying too much and saying nothing, is never resolved. Perhaps his 2nd Symphony had already said it all. And he distilled his essence into his song-cycles.

I wonder what he thought of Luigi Nono.

Conductor in control, orchestra fabulous throughout (if just a little TOO "hesitant" in no.4), heavy percussion threatening to overwhelm (but I enjoyed that). But this music - even the gorgeously-sung-and-played Szymanowski rhapsodies, needs more space to shine and resound.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The utterly silly comment that I heard from the announcer afterwards about how listening to Cage's Piano Concerto then changed WL's entire outlook beggars belief; did it have some effect? - well, yes - but did it result in some kind of volte-face? - not abit of it!

"Utterly silly" in context, certainly - and probably the result of a "Pocket Book of General Points to Make about Composers to fill empty Airtime (page 127, 'Lutoslawski'". Had the two works on the programme been the First and Second Symphony, however, the "utterness" fades somewhat. It's only a derivation of what Lutoslawski himself said on several occasions, emphasising that it was Cage's ideas that led him out of a creative rut, changing his ideas (his "outlook", if you like) about how a piece could be constructed effectively.

let's face it, the opening measures of his Fourth Symphony show his continued indebtedness to Szymanowski as almost to sound as though KS had actually written them!

Well, yes, but Roussel and Bartok are there, also. It's as if the composer, on the eve of his 80th birthday, was reassessing the early influences on his Music and revealing how what they were saying, and the way they were saying it, did not meet exactly his own creative impulses. Throughout the Fourth Symphony, moments of repose (where a lesser composer might have been tempted towards "glib" conclusions) are angrily challenged and mocked - the whole work is like late Yeats' late poem, What Then?:

His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
`What then?' sang Plato's ghost. `What then?'

Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
`What then?' sang Plato's ghost. `What then?'

All his happier dreams came true -
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
`What then?' sang Plato's ghost. `What then?'

`The work is done,' grown old he thought,
`According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought';
But louder sang that ghost, `What then?'

Restless seeking; indifference to the admiration of others; always dissatisfied - the marks of the greatest Artists at the top of their "game". (And "singing" the dissatifaction, too!)

[Sir Velo]

I tend to think that the slightly dry acoustic of last night's venue actually illuminated Lutoslawski's surgically precise textures. I have to admit to being a touch disappointed with the Concerto which, although brilliantly performed, didn't quite coalesce and catch fire in the way it can. However, the symphony was as fine a performance as I can recall; up there with Salonen's Sony recording which has long been the benchmark for this work. The Szymanowski songs made up in execution what they perhaps lacked in ambient atmosphere. In all, a concert to relish for any admirers of these two 20th century Polish masters, and urgently recommended to anyone who has shied away from them on the totally misplaced premise that they are unapproachable or difficult.

[BBMmk2]

What an imaginative programme!! Who would have thought ofa combination like this? This woulds have been a concert to die for!!

What apity it wasnt well attended, and i wouldnt have been able to go either!!

[RobertLeDiable]

Volkov and the BBCSSO were brilliant in its projections, but (as broadcast) the size of the hall rather cramped the display, precise but too dry

It sounded OK on air to me, but if you found it a little dry you should blame the sound engineer or the producer who may have preferred it that way. The hall (in my experience) is perfect for contemporary scores like the 4th Symphony - the acoustic warm but not too reverberant, and very clear. It's perfectly possible for a sound engineer to make the Royal Albert Hall sound dry, so you shouldn't judge the acoustic by the broadcast.

The utterly silly comment that I heard from the announcer afterwards about how listening to Cage's Piano Concerto then changed WL's entire outlook beggars belief

That's an odd thing to say - and unnecessarily rude about the presenter (who after all can't be expected to be a musicologist) - when what Lutoslawski actually said about the Cage was "It was in that year (1960) that I heard an excerpt from (Cage's) Piano Concerto and those few minutes were to change my life decisively.....I suddenly realised that I could compose music differently from that of my past..."

In the light of that, I would think that any reasonable person would say more or less what the presenter said.

[jayne lee wilson]

It sounded OK on air to me, but if you found it a little dry you should blame the sound engineer or the producer who may have preferred it that way. The hall (in my experience) is perfect for contemporary scores like the 4th Symphony - the acoustic warm but not too reverberant, and very clear. It's perfectly possible for a sound engineer to make the Royal Albert Hall sound dry, so you shouldn't judge the acoustic by the broadcast.



That's an odd thing to say - and unnecessarily rude about the presenter (who after all can't be expected to be a musicologist) - when what Lutoslawski actually said about the Cage was "It was in that year (1960) that I heard an excerpt from (Cage's) Piano Concerto and those few minutes were to change my life decisively.....I suddenly realised that I could compose music differently from that of my past..."

In the light of that, I would think that any reasonable person would say more or less what the presenter said.

I'm with ahinton here, since Lutoslawski's VOICE always remained so distinctive, whether in the Concerto for Orchestra, 2nd Symphony, middle-period classics like Mi-Parti or the later 3rd and 4th Symphonies. The experience of Cage changed his music "decisively", yes - but not his "entire outlook". Even the more conventionally structured Concerto shows that so-characteristic tendency to build tiny cellular fragments into huge climaxes - but as I said in my earlier post (no.7), those climaxes often sound provisional (the Concerto's intrada has the closest thing to a true climax, based on its main themes, but the end is oddly downbeat).

And as I said of the 4th Symphony in msg. 7 (re his oeuvre generally), he was always a self-reflective, self-doubting artist. He wasn't turned into one by a single experience. Personally, I think the often terrifying, nightmarish violence, the constant threat of incoherence, of some of his classic scores (especially early 60s to mid-70s) relates back to his experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto... perhaps Cage's methods helped those agonising images escape repression...

***RobertLeD. - no, I don't judge the acoustic by the broadcast - which is why I almost always put "as broadcast" in most of my comments...

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The Cage "revelation" was strong enough in Lutoslawski's estimation for him to make statements essentially identical to the one BobtheDevil quotes in #11 on four separate talks I heard him give in the early 1980s: Aldeburgh (at the Britten/Pears School for Advanced Music Studies) in November 1980; Glasgow (at the Musica Nova Festival) in 1981; the Royal Festival Hall at a pre-concert talk in 1983; and a pre-Prom talk in 1985. At the Glasgow event, I questioned him specifically on the nature of the Cage influence, and he pulled me up kindly but firmly to insist it wasn't an "influence" as such, but a revelation of a completely different way of constructing his own Music - a way out of the impasse he reached after the success of the Musique Funebre. To hear the Postlude followed by the Jeux Venitiens, he said, is to hear exactly how this new way of thinking about composition rejuvenated his creativity. In all four talks, he made the point that he wrote to Cage to thank him in the highest possible terms for his "help".

In the same way that it's not too "utterly silly" to claim that World War One changed RVW's "entire outlook", I don't think that the commentator's off-the-sheet remark is so offensive, although JLW's "decisively" is more accurate.

As to Lutoslawski being a "self-doubting" composer, it certainly didn't seem that way to the young composers whose work he would discuss with them, or to the performers of his Music, who were quickly, relentlessly but kindly shown how to correct any inaccuracies (the Brodsky Quartet were essentially shown how to perform - and not just Lutoslawski's Music! - after an intense afternoon's session with him at Aldeburgh). As a composer, always "self-questioning, "self-appraising, self-critical - but "self-doubting"? "Utterly silly"!

[RobertLeDiable]

but (as broadcast) the size of the hall rather cramped the display, precise but too dry. How I longed for more space, inner and outer. This was DVD rather than blu-ray.

was what you said in your first post. But have you been in the hall? It's not 'dry'. It's not over-reverberant but it's certainly not dry. In fact it's ideal for most things. You wouldn't do Mahler 8 in it, but something the size of Mahler 5 works well. Being a bit smaller (1100 seats) than the likes of Bridgewater or Birmingham the sound is pretty immediate, but not overwhelmingly loud.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Perhaps, "the sound from the radio loudspeakers made the acoustic of the hall seem cramped and too dry"?