Witold Lutoslawski

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (sticker on back and insert) Insert included.

There is a direct line between Witold Lutosławski's compositional formation and the catastrophes of the 20th century. Nazi occupation - during which he survived as a café pianist alongside Panufnik, and lost his complete manuscripts in 1944 - was followed by Stalinist cultural diktat, which required him to write folk arrangements and functional pieces while suppressing the formal ambitions that had already been developing since the 1930s. When the thaw came in 1956, Lutosławski later said, he could finally move faster along a line he had already chosen. His named masters were Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartók, and Varèse - a Franco-Polish axis that kept him at a remove from the Central European mainstream. This LP is one of the sharpest documents of that line in its most concentrated form.

Three works, recorded in Warsaw in 1965 for the Wergo label. Trois Poèmes d'Henri Michaux (1961-63) for twenty voices and wind orchestra was his second major work to employ what he called "limited aleatoricism" - a technique in which individual performers execute precisely notated material at their own tempo within a conducted rhythmic frame, generating a controlled density of simultaneous heterophony. The three Henri Michaux poems - the French surrealist's words rendered as a terrain of sound rather than declamation - unfold toward a single climax with the formal clarity of classical tragedy. Postludium (1958-60) is brief and austere, a floating orchestral study. The String Quartet (1964), performed by the LaSalle Quartet, is among the most accomplished chamber works of its decade: aleatory counterpoint and precise notation in constant productive tension, the four instruments generating a field rather than a conversation. Essential Wergo pressing, from the label's landmark Studio Reihe Neuer Musik series.