The Essential Lutoslawski
|
List Price: Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
|
|---|
(Click here)
Buy this Music CD at online store in your country
Canadian Music Store
Canadian Music Store
Free Music Notes for The Essential Lutoslawski
Free Music Review: Fabulous album!
Hit: 5 Stars
The constructive sonorous straightness enclosed inside a stylized cipher, the lucid tonal geometry and an overwhelming spontaneity that elapses with an intrinsic pleasant character, are some of the remarkable features of this fabulous composer. He has been able to approximate to the searches of the more advanced vanguard that proceeds from Pierre Boulez.
His musical speech supported by diatonic lines and the overlapping of interweaved tumultuous tonalities are not any obstacle to enjoy and appreciate his art.
I think this admirable Concerto for Orchestra is one the most representative works after the WW2. When you buy this double CD you will include it among your most estimated treasures.
Exceptional and rewarding selection with an insuperable sound.
Free Music Review: Tonal and atonal, Beautiful and radical.
Hit: 5 Stars
I still remember my first time playing Luto's Concerto for Orchestra when I was in PYP. my thoughts were something like "What the hell is this! It's tonal, yet so radical, yet so beautiful!" and then, when i heard his Musique Funebre at an Oregon Symphony concert, I was astounded that it was composed using Luto's version of twelve-tone theory. something so beautiful, yet so atonal! This twofer it worth it if only for those two pieces, yet you also get his amazing 3rd Symphony and Venetian Games, etc etc.Free Music Review: A portrait of the great Polish composer
Hit: 5 Stars
Witold Lutoslawski has rightfuly reached the position as one of the great masters of the 20th century music. His compositions are always presented with the composer's unique sense of beauty of tonal colour and pitch organisation which never turns out to be just pure mathematics. An artist should NOT be scientist or philosopher. Just a pure artist with heart, ideas and musical invention, that's all.
Even if Lutoslawski would not write anything else but the Concerto for orchestra, this magnificent, monumental work is one of the best orchestral works of the 20th century. Although many people describe the Concerto as the composition with Bartok influences, I do not find so many relations between these two works. Lutoslawski has such unique orchestral colour and is much more radical than Bartok.
The most radical works such as Venetian Games show the composer's taste for "sounding" but it is the weak point in his opus. It took Lutoslawski some time to rediscover himself. The Cello Concerto, Double Concerto and Third Symphony are excellent proof. Cello Concerto is a unique dialogue between soloist and orchestra, while Double Concerto is perhaps too "plural" to become a masterpiece and it lacks the certain stylistic point. Third Symphony is a true masterpiece and constantly surprises the listener with its ideas. The symphony also has a great organic development, good contrasts and modern beauty of melodies.
Free Music Review: best introduction to a modern master, a superb compilation
Hit: 5 Stars
Lutoslawski's music sounds to me like an early modern sensibility moving to incorporate more recent techniques. The two earliest pieces here are both superb -- "Concerto for Orchestra" (better than the Bartok piece by the same name!) and "Dance Preludes" from the early/mid 1950s. Following the post-Stalin thaw, Lutoslawski made contact with the West, and the two works from that initial encounter, "Funeral Music" (for Bartok) and "Venetian Games" are perhaps the highlights of the disc -- resolutely modern music that, again, maintains the accessibility of Bartok or Stravinsky. I don't find the "Cello Concerto" of 1970 compelling, but the "Concerto for Oboe, Harp & Chamber Orchestra" of 1980 is brilliant.
"Symphony No. 3," finished in 1983, is widely considered to be Lutoslawski's masterpiece, but I am not convinced. Similar structurally to his "Symphony No. 2" (avoid!) and his "String Quartet," but better, most of the work is development, but it never seems to develop into anything very noteworthy. Lutoslawski was trying too hard to be radical in these works, while his strength was in carrying on in a less radical style with light touches of serialism and later developments. Though Lutoslawski himself was conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, the original recording of the Third Symphony included on this disc is nowhere near as good as the performance just a month later by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting. Look for the Sony disc of Lutoslawski's SYMPHONIES NO.s 3 & 4" (see my review). Another set worth checking out is called LUTOSLAWSKI: ORCHESTRAL WORKS, SONGS, STRING QUARTET, a recent 2-disc release in EMI's GEMINI series (see my review).
The range of fantastic music on this disc alone reveals Lutoslawski's level of accomplishment among the late 20th century greats.
Free Music Review: Great
Hit: 5 Stars
Lutoslawski is easily one of the best post-war composers I have yet to encounter. As other reviewers have commented, I did find it difficult to fully appreciate some of these works on the first listen. The entertaining and original "Variations on a Theme of Paganini" is probably the most accessible, but only vaguely hints at the drama and power of the later works. I was first drawn to the "Concerto for Orchestra", which, although mostly tonal, still provides ample evidence of Lutoslawski's originality. The remaining works, except for the "Dance Preludes", are definitely written in a modern style, often using techniques such as chance, twelve tone rows, and microtones (or at least I'm pretty sure I hear them, at least in the Cello Concerto). The Cello Concerto contains an interesting series of events between soloist and orchestra, supposedly representing individual and society. Les Espaces du Sommeil is a setting of a 20th century French poem (inexplicably not included in the liner notes) that is vividly brought to life by Lutoslawski's music. The Oboe/Harp Concerto is another excellent work, which, like much of the music, I found somewhat dreamlike and having slightly Oriental flavor. Probably the most monumental work is the Symphony no. 3, which I found somewhat difficult to listen to at first, because the introduction is very jarring. However, after a sufficient number of listens, I found it to be excellent, and its brilliant finale is definitely not to be missed. I look forward to hearing more of Lutoslawski's music.
More Free Music Notes:
1 2
1 2