Cello Concerto; Chamber Concerto; Piano Concerto

The music and life of Polish composer Witold Lutosławski (1913–1994) pivoted around key events in his country’s tumultuous twentieth-century history. The so-called cultural ‘thaw’ at the end of Stalinism in the mid 1950s permitted Poland’s composers to begin experiments in a range of modernist styles. Lutosławski forged a unique voice by exploring tensions between the classicist sensibility underpinning his neoclassical pre-thaw compositions (a style that had brought him into a position of preeminence in Poland) and more radical, avant-garde alternatives. So while he created individualistic and, often, beautiful solutions to post-tonal compositional problems of pitch organization, rhythm, texture, orchestration and long-range musical structuring, his greater contribution was marshaling his technique to compose powerfully affecting musical narratives responding, albeit obliquely, to the events and cultural atmospheres of his life and times. In major works including his Trois poems d’Henri Michaux, String Quartet, Livre pour orchestre, Cello Concerto, Mi-parti, Piano Concerto, Chain 2 and Symphony No. 4 – compositions that brought him international recognition as one of the mid-to-late twentieth century’s finest composers – Lutosławski created (to speak drily) modernist musical narratives exploring the problems of plot and representation in an innovative language, or (to speak more evocatively) structures of feeling and form that transcend the mundane specificity of programme music to offer visceral, spellbinding and moving testimony on the late-modern human experience, and from a distinctive Polish perspective.

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Zapis aleatoryzmu kontrolowanego jako instrukcja działania dla wykonawców na wybranych przykładach kompozycji Witolda Lutosławskiego.

Investigationes Linguisticae ◽

10.14746/il.2017.36.6. ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 36 ◽

pp. 86-106

Author(s):

Jakub Chrenowicz

Keyword(s):

Formal Language ◽

Music Notation ◽

Piano Concerto ◽

Witold Lutoslawski ◽

Transcription System ◽

Starting Point ◽

Cello Concerto ◽

State Of Affairs

The goal of the article is to present the transcription system in Witold Lutosławski’s pieces composed using the technique of controlled aleatorism as a formal language for the transmission of instructions to the conductor and orchestra musicians performing those works. The starting point for my ruminations is to explore controlled aleatorism from the performer’s perspective.The text invokes excerpts from three pieces by Witold Lutosławski: Cello concerto, Chain I, and Piano Concerto. The author presents an account of the controlled aleatorism technique and analyzes the graphic signs used in the aforementioned compositions, along with the ways in which they are interpreted by performers. The author contends that the examined transcriptions are a collection of instructions of varying degrees of complexity, addressed to musicians performing the analyzed pieces. Such a system of notation can be interpreted as a formal language which the composer programmed the work of the conductor and orchestra musicians. Beginning with the simplest instructions, he proceeded to create complex, algorithmic commands.The conclusions drawn from the above analyses point to the essence of controlled aleatorism in music notation and its interpretations. The element of control overrides the element of randomness, and such a state of affairs is attained by using a particular type of transcription.

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PICKER: Keys to the City (Piano Concerto); And Suddenly It's Evening; Cello Concerto. Jeremy Denk (pno), Paul Watkins (vlc), Russian Philharmonic Orchestra c. Thomas Sanderling. Chandos CHAN 10039.

Tempo ◽

10.1017/s004029820332025x ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 57 (225) ◽

pp. 57-58

Author(s):

Bret Johnson

Keyword(s):

Piano Concerto ◽

Cello Concerto ◽

The City

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Clara Schumann's Interiorities and the Cutting Edge of Popular Pianism

Journal of the American Musicological Society ◽

10.1525/jams.2017.70.3.697 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 70 (3) ◽

pp. 697-765

Author(s):

Alexander Stefaniak

Keyword(s):

Cutting Edge ◽

Critical Discourse ◽

Robert Schumann ◽

Piano Concerto ◽

Sheet Music ◽

Variation Sets ◽

Music Market ◽

Critical Responses ◽

Drawing Room ◽

Variations On A Theme

In her contemporaries’ imaginations Clara Schumann transcended aesthetic pitfalls endemic to virtuosity. Scholars have stressed her performance of canonic repertory as a practice through which she established this image. In this study I argue that her concerts of the 1830s and 1840s also staged an elevated form of virtuosity through showpieces that inhabited the flagship genres of popular pianism and that, for contemporary critics, possessed qualities of interiority that allowed them to transcend merely physical or “mechanical” engagement with virtuosity. They include Henselt's études and variation sets, Chopin's “Là ci darem” Variations, op. 2, and Clara's own Romance variée, op. 3, Piano Concerto, op. 7, and Pirate Variations, op. 8. Her 1830s and early 1840s programming offers a window onto a rich intertwining of critical discourse, her own and her peers’ compositions, and her strategies as a pianist-composer. This context reveals that aspirations about elevating virtuosity shaped a broader, more varied field of repertory, compositional strategies, and critical responses than we have recognized. It was a capacious, flexible ideology and category whose discourses pervaded the sheet music market, the stage, and the drawing room and embraced not only a venerated, canonic tradition but also the latest popularly styled virtuosic vehicles. In the final stages of the article I propose that Clara Schumann's 1853 Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, op. 20, alludes to her work of the 1830s and 1840s, evoking the range of guises this pianist-composer gave to her virtuosity in what was already a wide-ranging career.

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Orpheus Revisited: A Ten-Year Retrospect on the Andante con moto of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto

19th-Century Music ◽

10.1525/ncm.1995.19.1.02a00020 ◽

1995 ◽

Vol 19 (1) ◽

pp. 31-49 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Owen Jander

Keyword(s):

Piano Concerto

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Topoi in der Musik Béla Bartóks

Studia Musicologica ◽

10.1556/smus.54.2013.3.3 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 54 (3) ◽

pp. 289-299

Author(s):

Jürgen Hunkemöller

Keyword(s):

Bird Song ◽

Musical Analysis ◽

Piano Concerto ◽

The Third ◽

Different Types ◽

Important Means

The recognition of topoi, i.e. traditional formulae, is an important means of musical analysis. To illustrate this, the paper discusses the types of the battaglia and the pastoral in Bach’s Cantata Halt im Gedächtnis Jesum Christ, and briefly enumerates different types of allusions to jazz in 20th-century compositions by Stravinsky, Milhaud, Blacher, Tippet, and Zimmermann. Then it raises the possibility of an analysis of topoi in Bartók’s music in four main categories. It considers Bartók’s musical quotations from Bach to Shostakovich; the chorale as special topos appearing in Mikrokosmos, in the Concerto for Orchestra, in the Adagio religioso of the Third Piano Concerto; the topos-like employment of the tritone; and finally the idea of a Bartókian Arcadia in the Finale of Music for Strings, and the integration of bird song in the Adagio religioso.

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