Lutosławski reviews

Lutosawski’s Concerto for Orchestra was composed using a Bartókian model and incorporating folk music in order to satisfy the authorities in communist Poland at a time (1954) when the doctrine of socialist realism was still in place. But Lutosawski preserved his integrity in a piece that also points towards some of his later stylistic traits, and in this newest version of an often-recorded work Miguel Harth-Bedoya steers a skilful line in reconciling these various elements.

Krystian Zimerman has recorded Lutosławski’s Piano Concerto before, even for the same label: as dedicatee, he not only gave its premiere in Salzburg in 1988 but made the first recording under the composer’s baton soon afterwards. He has lived with the work ever since, and over a quarter of a century on his performances of it mix complete authority with fresh, questing spirit, as if he were laying out the notes for the first time. So there is not just room but need for another recording from him, especially with such outstanding forces as the Berlin Philharmonic.

The striking opening of Andrzej Panufnik’s First Quartet – a powerfully attacked unison followed by a series of fragmentary conversations – immediately shows the intensity of this performance and the richness of the recording. Sonority and instrumental colour are as important as melody and harmony: it’s fearsomely exposed writing, and the Tippett Quartet barely puts a foot wrong in the harmonics, glissandi, rustling tremolandos, and gradually emerging passion, before the music subsides back on to the note where it started.

On this latest Lutosawski release from Chandos there is a welcome disconnect between the first work and the rest of the programme. It opens with the Little Suite (1950), which predates even Lutosawski’s popular Concerto for Orchestra and shows the young composer already grappling with – and slightly circumventing – the demands of socialist realism. Based on folk melodies collected in south-east Poland, its bracing colours receive a performance of fresh vitality here from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Edward Gardner.

The Symphonic Variations from 1938 already show the young Lutosławski’s expertise in colourful orchestration. Here Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony, backed up by glittering sound, do this work proud, from the folk-like opening flute theme, through its varied treatments. Better known are the Paganini Variations, usually heard in their original two-piano version, rather than this much later concertante arrangement. Louis Lortie is an ideal soloist, with the clarity of touch familiar from his recordings of the French repertoire, but also the power for the bigger gestures.

Lutosławski’s Chantefleurs et Chantefables is one of his best-loved scores. It makes a fitting climax to this programme of music for solo voice and orchestra, the second disc in Edward Gardner’s Lutosławski series. Premiered at the Proms in 1991, Lutosławski’s penultimate work consists of nine miniatures conjuring up animals and plants from a child’s perspective, and the BBC SO’s performances here sparkle brilliantly. Lucy Crowe deploys an impressive palette of soprano colours.

As chief of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons has made it his mission to broaden Munich’s experience of East European music. All three performances here were recorded live in 2008 and ’09, and Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra lives up to its title in a performance where every musician indeed plays like a soloist.

Classic recordings under the composer’s taut direction, which remain consistently impressive and, in the Concerto for Orchestra and later masterpieces such as Livre and Mi-parti, truly thrilling. Anthony Burton

The BBC SO had a long association with Lutosawski, but made only a few commercial recordings with him as conductor. One of them was Chain 3, which they revisit here, with sound clearer than the 20-year-old DG version with the composer in charge, though there’s little to choose between them as performances.

In programming this pair of concertos Christian Poltéra inevitably courts comparison with the 1975 EMI disc of Rostropovich, for whom both works were written.

We can dismiss thoughts of Swiss elegance vying with Russian wildness: both players do wildness and elegance with equal conviction, and in technique there’s nothing to choose between them.