A patron of sound
From March 2-10, the Witold Lutosławski Forum at the Warsaw Philharmonic will host a festival celebrating music of the 20th-century.
The Lutosławski Forum is a series of contemporary music concerts, art exhibitions, discussions, seminars and lectures held by experts and artists. The event is expected to provide an opportunity for famous works from the last century to rub elbows with lesser-known pieces by younger composers.
The inspiration for the Forum came about in the early 1990s when Kazimierz Kord, director and artistic manager of the Warsaw Philharmonic, invited the world-famous composer Witold Lutosławski to participate in an event devoted to the greatest works of contemporary music. Lutosławski prepared a repertoire of pieces he considered to be the most important in the 20th century, including Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms and Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin. Soon enough, what was originally to be a one-off affair turned into an annual festival.
During this 12th edition of the Lutosławski Forum, the works of masters such as Bartok, Britten, Xenakis, Dutilleux will be presented alongside Lutosławski's music.
Witold Lutosławski, who died in 1994, is said to be one of the finest Polish composers in a pantheon that includes Chopin and Szymanowski. He was considered a pioneer in a compositional technique called controlled aleatory, in which the composition allows a degree of discretion with regard to the alteration of the architecture or the progression of a performance on the part of the conductor. His oeuvre encompasses music for orchestras, soloists, vocalists and chamber music.
