Concerto for Orchestra

Program notes

About the Work

In 1950 Witold Rowicki, director of the Warsaw Philharmonic, an orchestra then re-establishing itself after the war, asked Witold Lutosławski for a piece with which the orchestra could show what it could do. Lutosławski took four years over it. The Concerto for Orchestra was finished in 1954, is dedicated to Rowicki, and was first performed under him in Warsaw on 26 November of that year.

The times shaped the piece. From 1949 Polish composers were under official pressure to write music founded on folk material, and more experimental paths were closed. Lutosławski, though, had been working with Polish folk tunes for years, largely in what he called functional music: pieces for radio, theatre and schools, by which he earned his living. In an interview he recalled that this work had given him a style of his own, simple folk melodies combined with non-tonal counterpoint and colourful harmonies, and that one day he decided the style could serve for something more serious.

So the Concerto is full of folk melodies, taken from the nineteenth-century collections of the ethnographer Oskar Kolberg, but it does not sound like an arrangement of them. The tunes are raw material. Lutosławski gives them new harmonies, sets counterpoints against them and pours them into forms borrowed from the Baroque: an intrada, a passacaglia, a toccata, a chorale. As one programme note puts it, the music was national enough to be politically unassailable and yet modern and personal enough to go beyond what was officially wanted.

The title invites comparison with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra of a decade earlier, and the two share the idea of treating sections of the orchestra as soloists. The piece lasts just under half an hour and calls for a large orchestra with piano, celesta and two harps.

What to Listen For

Intrada. The movement opens over a steady, ominous drumbeat. Above it the low strings introduce a folk-like tune, which passes from section to section while the texture thickens. Having built upwards to a climax, the music then reverses its course and ends in a calm coda.

Capriccio notturno ed Arioso. An airy, virtuoso scherzo for strings and woodwind: night music of great lightness. In the middle the brass break in with a broad, dramatic theme, the Arioso. The scherzo then returns and fades out in low rumblings.

Passacaglia, Toccata e Corale. The finale is the longest movement and the weightiest. It begins with a brooding theme in the double basses that is repeated over and over while variations accumulate above it. A lively toccata follows, built on the same theme. At its centre a solemn chorale appears, and when the chorale returns at the end it crowns the whole work, before a final dash for the full orchestra.