Tag Archives: Witold Lutoslawski

BBC SSO / Gardolínska

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City Halls, Glasgow

It’s just over two years since Polish conductor Marta Gardolínska made her impressive debut with the the RSNO. It wasn’t an ideal first appearance, given that lingering Covid restrictions had required that to be an online stream. Here at VoxCarnyx, though, we felt she definitely brought a “springlike freshness” to Lutosławski’s music. We hoped she’d be back in Scotland live sometime soon.

Well, here she was, this time with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and once more conducting some Lutosławski with all the natural affinity you’d expect from a Polish compatriot. This was a meatier example of Lutosławski, his gritty 1950s Concerto for Orchestra, a work characterised by its East European bite, loaded folk melodies, pugnacious rhythms and searing passion.

Gardolínska harnessed all of that impressively. The curt motivic engineering of the opening bars, the pulsing timpani persisting like a obdurate child, rich clarion blasts from the brass leading to a climax as ferocious as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, soon calmed to reveal a rosier vision as the Intrada drew to a quieter close.

The central Capriccio shaped its own narrative destiny, a cascading menagerie of perpetual motion, through which the piano and xylophone fired razor-sharp shards of colour (one glancing motif from the xylophone hinting strongly of a quote from Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra) before a heavier mood took hold courtesy of the brass. The Finale, a magnificently inventive Passacaglia originating from the murky depths of the double basses, ultimately engulfed by a chorale-like peroration not unlike that in the Intermezzo of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, provided a thrilling conclusion.

This wasn’t the only work in Thursday’s afternoon concert to showcase the orchestra’s constituent virtuosity, in particular the front desk strings. It had already been plentifully displayed in Gażyna Bacewicz’s 1948 Concerto for String Orchestra, more concentrated in scale than the Lutosławski, and sourcing its own exuberance in a style more rooted in neoclassicism. This performance had mischief, pathos, melting eloquence and outright joy, and a level of precision and attack to fully sustain its enjoyment.

Completing the Polish package was Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No 1, but with the extraordinary South Korean soloist Bomsori. Gardolínska again elicited an appealing response from the SSO, in the concerto’s toy box opening, its rhapsodic surges and sumptuous textures. 

As for Bomsori, what seemed initially like a rigid, unmoving first few bars proved to be a theatrical ruse. For what followed was a triumph of enchantment, the violinist’s increasing physical intensity echoing a musical journey that grew from teasing excitement to rapturous rhapsodic heights, only to dissolve whimsically with the orchestra into a final throwaway pizzicato. 

Ken Walton

This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, when it will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds.

BBC SSO/Collon

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City Halls, Glasgow

THE space and acoustic of Glasgow’s City Hall was another crucial player, alongside the members of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Nicholas Collon, in the performance that opened Thursday afternoon’s radio concert.

Grazyna Bacewicz’s Music for Strings, Trumpets, and Percussion is something of a classic of 20th century Polish music, dating from a time in 1958 when the Soviet hold on creativity there was loosening its grip. Bacewicz and her better-known contemporary Witold Lutoslawski were able to have some more progressive music performed, and Lutoslawski’s Funeral Music for strings is of the same year. It is explicitly dedicated to Bela Bartok and the similarity of Bacewicz’s title to Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste suggests the Hungarian composer was at least on her mind.

Perhaps she is less well-known in the West because, although prolific, she did not forge onwards as Lutoslawski did, but this 20 minute work deserves to he heard more often, and as sonorously as it could be appreciated here. Preceding Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, it was possible to hear some pastoral moments, but much more nature red in tooth and claw, and really this is abstract music, concerned with the tonalities of the instruments involved.

While there was some militaristic brass, the five trumpets also showed flashes of being a big band section, especially when muted towards the eerie ending of the second, central movement. It is chiefly the eloquent writing for the low strings that really distinguishes the score, however, and the SSO players provided real richness of tone.

Collon’s account of Beethoven’s Pastoral also boasted a lovely clarity of sound, immediately appreciable in the entry of the winds in the first movement, and in some surprisingly staccato propulsive cellos. Although there is a wealth of melody in the whole work, Beethoven stretches the material in the second movement a long way, and the conductor’s relaxed pace seemed to draw attention to that until the very pronounced birdcalls at its end.

The storm that follows was all the more dramatic as a result, but the whole arc of the piece seemed a little askew, as was something in the orchestral intonation at the start of the finale, in a performance that never sounded entirely sure of its shape.
Keith Bruce