Output details

Concerto for Orchestra

16 minutes. Winner of the International Competition for Lutosławski’s 100th Birthday (24 June 2013).

Premiere 28th September 2013 by the Warsaw Philharmonic at the 56th Warsaw Autumn International Festival.

Published by UYMP

This piece could be described as a 'voyage in time', where ancient and modern aspects of utterance – musical or otherwise – interconnect and complement each other. It is precisely in this sense of being in concordance – 'in concert' – that the term 'concerto' is used here; a network of relationships between various idiomatic aspects of musical language develops throughout the work. For example, the chromatic structure in the strings at the beginning of the piece overlaps with, and gradually gives way to, a song-like character based predominantly on ‘white’ modality in the brass section that follows. These two structures are substantially different but co-exist and, later on, interact. The climax of the piece (p.37) is a chromatically saturated chord spaced in such a way that both white and black structures are identified.

The idea of creating thinner and more transparent sonorities within total chromaticism has been a concern of mine concerned me for some time. One question that arose with the _Concerto_ concerned the treatment of the orchestra. I opted for an approach where each of the four orchestral departments is given its own specific material, and is singled out, each in turn, for its powerful and/or delicate expressive qualities. At the same time, the orchestral groups constantly interact with one another, searching for points of convergence between specific instrumental colourations. During this process of ‘zooming in and out’, as it were, various instrumental alliances are formed.

An predominantly static quality throughout the piece bears comparison with the String Quartet No 4, and as in that work the Concerto ends with an array of natural harmonics.