Béla Bartók, Stuttgarter Kammerorchester, Dennis Russell Davies

Witold Lutosławski wrote Musique funèbre in memory of Béla Bartók, and this album places it at the head of a Bartók programme for strings and children's voices. The Lutosławski is the work that defined its composer's mature style and brought him international recognition, winning a first prize at a UNESCO competition in Paris in 1959. Around it, Dennis Russell Davies and the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester play the Divertimento and the Romanian Folk Dances, and the Hungarian Radio Children's Choir sings seven of Bartók's choruses.

Davies has a long association with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, documented on ECM in repertoire from Mozart to Kancheli, and he is its Conductor Laureate. The sessions took place at the Liederhalle in Stuttgart in May 2004 and February 2010, with Manfred Eicher as producer and Peter Laenger as engineer. Wolfgang Sandner wrote the booklet essay, where he states that Bartók's influence on Lutosławski "cannot be overestimated".

Conductor Jan Krenz commissioned the piece for the tenth anniversary of Bartók's death, but Lutosławski worked on it from 1954 to 1958. Krenz premiered it in Katowice on 26 March 1958. It runs about 14 minutes in four linked sections, Prologue, Metamorphosis, Apogeum and Epilogue. The prologue builds canons on a twelve-tone row made only of tritones and minor seconds, the music contracts to a unison at its centre, and it ends on a single cello. Bartók's Divertimento for string orchestra dates from 1939, was written for Paul Sacher and the Basler Kammerorchester, and was completed just before the composer left Europe for the United States. The Romanian Folk Dances of 1917 appear in Arthur Willner's 1937 string orchestra arrangement. The choruses, among them Hussar, Bread-baking and Jeering, come from the 27 Two- and Three-Part Choruses.

In BBC Music Magazine in 2012, John Allison gave the disc four stars. He found that the twelve-note chords at the Lutosławski's climax have "a powerful scrunch" in this performance. He thought the Divertimento well played but wanted more rigour from it, and heard the children's choruses as wonderfully fresh, one of the main reasons to own the record.

CD edition of ECM New Series 2169, first released on 27 April 2012.