Symphony No. 4

Program notes

About the Work

Lutosławski’s Symphony No. 4 was his last symphony and one of his final major scores, completed in 1992 and premiered in Los Angeles on 5 February 1993 with the composer conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which had commissioned it and which Esa-Pekka Salonen was then leading, a connection that gives tonight’s performance a particular resonance. The premiere marked Lutosławski’s eightieth birthday, and the work has the distilled, unhurried authority of a master who no longer needed to prove anything. He died barely a year after its premiere, so the Fourth stands as a kind of valediction, the summation of a symphonic language he had refined over four decades.

Unlike his Third Symphony of 1983, a turbulent and sharply sectional drama, the Fourth unfolds as a single continuous span of roughly twenty-two minutes: two parts, an introduction and a main movement, played without a break. Within that span Lutosławski deploys the two techniques most closely associated with his maturity. The first is what he called ‘chain’ form: rather than building paragraphs that begin and end together, he overlaps strands of music so that one idea is already fading as the next emerges, the seams deliberately staggered like the links of a chain. The effect is of music that is always in the process of becoming, with no clean joins to mark where one thing stops and another starts. The second is his celebrated ‘ad libitum’ or controlled-aleatory writing, in which groups of players are given precisely notated material but are instructed to play it freely, out of strict ensemble, so that the lines blur into a glittering, slightly unstable haze of sound. Crucially, Lutosławski always kept the harmony and the large shape firmly under his own control: the freedom is local and textural, never structural.

What is striking about the Fourth is its lyricism. The chromatic harmony that had once sounded austere here turns warm, even songful, and the symphony is dominated by long, singing lines, often in the strings and high woodwinds, that give it an almost Romantic glow. There is darkness and unease too, and the music gathers toward powerful climaxes, but the prevailing impression is of a late style that has made its peace with beauty. It is the late work of a composer who spent his life balancing rigour and spontaneity, and who, at the end, let the singing voice come to the fore.

What to Listen For

Because the Fourth runs without pause, the most useful thing to listen for is the way Lutosławski manages flow rather than division. The opening is hushed and exploratory: fragmentary woodwind phrases drift in over a low cushion, the music seeming to assemble itself out of the air. Notice how ideas overlap (a phrase in the clarinets is already handing over to the oboes before it has finished), so that the texture is continuous but never static. This is the ‘chain’ technique at work; resist the urge to listen for clear sections and instead follow the long thread.

Listen too for the contrast between the symphony’s two ways of moving. In some passages the orchestra plays together in measured time, the harmony clear and directed; in others the players are turned loose into the ‘ad libitum’ freedom, and the sound becomes a shimmering blur, many lines flickering independently. The alternation between these states, the focused and the diffuse, is one of the work’s great pleasures.

Follow the long melodic lines, especially in the violins, which are the emotional core of the piece. As the symphony progresses, these gather urgency and the orchestra swells toward a series of climaxes, the brass and percussion lending weight. The closing pages bring a final, hard-won intensity before the music subsides. Above all, attend to colour: Lutosławski was a supreme orchestrator, and the Fourth is a masterclass in instrumental shading, every chord weighted and lit with extraordinary care.