Lutosławski Symphonies 1-4 – Salonen

Esa-Pekka Salonen has lived with this music since he was a teenager in Helsinki, sneaking scores out of the library and conducting them in his head on the bus. That intimacy tells. You hear it in the way the Los Angeles Philharmonic attacks the opening of the Fanfare — brassy, unbuttoned, almost hooligan in its glee — before the disc settles into the murkier world of the Symphony No. 1, a work Lutosławski wrote under the noses of Nazi occupiers and then Stalinist cultural commissars, neither of whom he trusted an inch, and both of whom shaped, by opposition, the music’s guarded wit.

This new Sony release gathers a centennial’s worth of listening onto two well-filled discs. The format alone makes an argument: here is Lutosławski as a symphonist of the first rank, not merely the author of the Concerto for Orchestra that everybody already owns three copies of. The First Symphony gets its premiere recording under Salonen here, freshly minted, and it sits with new colleagues — the Fanfare, all of fifty-five seconds of unbridled noise — while the Second, Third, and Fourth are pulled forward from the back catalog, familiar faces at a reunion.

Does the First need another disc? Yes. This one earns its place. Salonen finds a nervous, glittering energy in the Allegro giusto that suits a young composer working out how Bartók and Stravinsky might be reconciled with a language entirely his own — not yet the aleatoric Lutosławski of the mature works, but audibly straining toward him. Edward Gardner’s near-contemporaneous account for Chandos, part of his ongoing Polish series, arrives at virtually the identical timing across the whole symphony, an odd coincidence, or perhaps not so odd, given how precisely the printed metronome markings are honored by conductors who take Lutosławski’s own recordings as gospel. Gardner lingers more in the Poco adagio, finding a chalky, Bartókian bleakness in the string writing that I find genuinely moving; his hushed high violins have a translucence Salonen’s brighter, more forward-balanced strings don’t quite match. But Salonen claws back ground in the finale and especially in the Allegretto misterioso, where his ear for Stravinskian pointillism — those clipped woodwind exclamations, the pizzicato that seems to evaporate before it lands — is a small marvel of ensemble discipline. It’s a coin toss. I’d lean Gardner, by a nose, for sheer atmosphere. Only a nose.

The Second Symphony, dating from the mid-1960s and Lutosławski’s full immersion in controlled aleatorism, asks something different of engineers and interpreters alike. It wants space, near-silence, sonic vapor that coheres and dissolves. Salonen’s account, recorded a few years back and folded in here, is very fine but slightly recessed compared to the vivid proximity Antoni Wit achieves on his budget-priced Naxos version, and more recent recordings — Gardner’s among them — capture more of the visceral, close-miked drama this score depends on for its shock value. Still, the piece’s mysterious, chain-reaction structure comes through, movement by unpredictable movement, and Salonen never loses the architectural thread even when the surface sounds like organized chaos.

The two disc-mates on the second CD, the Third and Fourth Symphonies, are not new. Salonen recorded them years ago, and they’ve been reference points ever since, rightly so. The Third, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony and unveiled by Georg Solti in 1983, remains the summit of Lutosławski’s orchestral achievement, its slow build from fragmentary gesture to that shattering, hammered tutti one of the great structural coups of late twentieth-century symphonism. Salonen’s version has lost none of its bite: the brass chorale near the close still raises the hair on the back of the neck. The Fourth, terser and more elegiac, was Lutosławski’s valedictory orchestral utterance — he did not live to hear many more performances of it — and Salonen, who knew the composer personally and led the world premiere with the LA Philharmonic in 1993, brings something almost like filial tenderness to its wintry lyricism.

Do you need this if you already own the earlier separate discs? Perhaps not, strictly. But as a single-sitting survey of a composer who deserves to be ranked with Shostakovich and Britten among the last great symphonists of the century, this compilation comes close to ideal: beautifully engineered, authoritative, and animated throughout by a conductor who never treats Lutosławski as a museum piece. Buy it for the First Symphony. Keep it for everything else.