If there's one compositional form in 20th century music
that I value above all others, it's the Concerto for Orchestra. Most
people associate Bela Bartok with the form, but it predates his, with
both Zoltan Kodaly and Paul Hindemith having written earlier ones. There
are also fine later ones by Michael Tippett, Stephen Paulus, Joan
Tower, William Mathias, and many more. But Witold Lutoslawski's,
composed in 1954, is to me the only one as great as Bartok's. It shares
to an extent the sound-world, of fluttering uncertainty mixed with
furious power, and like the Bartok the ideas in it are numerous and
well-interwoven. His far more experimental Symphony #3 of 1983 is
in two halves, one that introduces and briefly varies the work's
themes, then a second that goes back to the beginning and reintroduces
all of them, this time with more elaborate development. It's full of
expressive, big-gesture music that uses lots of dissonance but now and
again will suddenly stop to allow something purely tonal to flower.
Portions of the work are semi-aleatoric; players are following notated
music but different sections of the orchestra are allowed to repeat or
go on to later sections at their own pace, and become asychronized. The
Chicago Symphony Orchestra (which premiered the symphonies) performs
under the baton of Daniel Barenboim on this 1993 Erato CD.
From the Gramophone review:
Lutoslawski's Third Symphony was commissioned by the Chicago SO and first performed by them under Solti in 1983, but only nine years later did the orchestra record the work. Erato's live recordings in Orchestra Hall have already won praise: with reference to Barenboim's performance of Das Lied von der Erde, John Borwick wrote of "a surprisingly ambient feeling of depth and richness to the sound", with the orchestra "set in a natural spread only occasionally seeming to be boosted a little by the engineers" (6/92, page 112). This new disc has comparable qualities, the unobtrusiveness of the balancing well matching the care and precision of Barenboim's interpretation. Antoni Wit and his Polish players on Polskie Nagrania Muza launch the symphony with greater verve, and they sustain a strong dramatic line throughout, but the recording is reverberant to the point of coarseness. Neither Wit nor Salonen (whose CBS Masterworks version is available only in a two-disc box with Messiaen's Turangalila-Symphonie), can equal Barenboim's blend of refined detail and cumulative power, and the Erato recording is also more faithful to the dynamics marked in the score. The Concerto for Orchestra, completed almost 30 years before the symphony, is comparatively conservative in style, but it has ample substance to match its panache. It also remains a formidable challenge to an orchestra, and it is fascinating to compare these versions by the two giants of the Great Lakes. Christoph von Dohnanyi and the Cleveland Orchestra (Decca) are nothing if not bold: there's a brashness in their response to Lutoslawski's agressivo marking at the start which Barenboim fastidiously avoids, and more bravado elsewhere: for example, at the beginning of the third movement, where Barenboim is closer to crotchet=60 than to the 70 marked in the score. As with the symphony, Barenboim's strength is the large-scale creation and sustaining of tension, and the Erato recording contains the heavy climaxes without draining them of clarity or impact. Decca's Cleveland recording was not much liked by the "Sounds in Retrospect" team (6/90), although to my mind the sheer excitement and conviction of Dohnanyi's reading more than compensates for the element of artificiality in the recorded sound. Given that Dohnanyi is rather too earnest in the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, however, Erato's new all-Lutoslawski coupling is undoubtedly the one to have. --Arnold Whittall
Disc, booklet, and case are in mint condition.
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