维托尔德·卢托斯拉夫斯基
作曲
Witold Lutosławski is considered the foremost Polish composer of the second half of the 20th century. His melodious and expressive compositions were as successful at new music festivals as they were in the concert series of renowned symphony orchestras – including the Berliner Philharmoniker. Lutosławski conducted them in a performance of his Third Symphony in November 1985.
After early piano lessons, Witold Lutosławski began studying the violin at the age of 13 at the conservatory in Warsaw under Lidia Kmitowa. Two years later, he received composition lessons from Witold Maliszewski, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov. After graduating with degrees in piano and composition, Lutosławski was drafted into the army during Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland and was taken prisoner by the Germans, but managed to escape. During the occupation, Lutosławski went underground in Warsaw as a bar pianist and taught in secret conservatory circles. Until 1944, he also performed almost daily in a piano duo with Andrzej Panufnik in the legendary – and forbidden – salons of Bolesław Woytowicz. After the war, Lutosławski’s First Symphony was branded “formalist” by Stalin’s most powerful cultural politician, Andrei Zhdanov, and banned from performance. In 1956, the musician took advantage of the political thaw to co-found the festival Warsaw Autumn and, inspired by John Cage’s First Piano Concerto, developed what he called “aleatoric counterpoint”. In its ambivalence between freedom and constraint, this leads, according to Lutosławski, to a “supple texture of rich, capricious rhythms that cannot be achieved in any other way” in his music. Until the 1980s, “controlled aleatoric” music dominated his extensive oeuvre, although he remained faithful to the ideal of loose control even later in his career. A composer and conductor of high international renown, Lutosławski taught at Dartmouth College in Tanglewood, the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and Texas State University, among others.
