Of Tempi

I often listen to Sibelius for the compositional starkness of his most despairing works, like the 7th Symphony, his final, his shortest, his ground breaker as it declared that a piece with a single movement that contained the requisite symphonic expressions could be treated as a symphony, even in its manifestation as a single (mass).

Lutoslawski offers a composition that is much the same length as Sibelius' and is no more or less unconventional. The work is tied to the discipline of a double concerto by its showcase of two instruments. Remove the feature, redirect the structure.... Save for Lutoslawski's composition being a bad example of how this can be done, for it lacks the requisite symphonic elements.

There are, however, strange congruences. What I might call massiveness in Sibelius I hear as empty space in Lutoslawski for unlike Sibelius's motif which is a solid mass, much like an iceberg, Lutoslawski picks away at our aural sensibilities and supplies a dense if spaced out stage for the oboe and most certainly the harp. The crescendos are common and both are nautical. Sibelius sings the song of the iceberg cast, Lutoslawski suggests the seasons of turbulence of water and rocky shore. Ice in winter, breakup in spring, placid in summer and fall. Only in measure, water in different massive states.

The percussive explosions of Lutoslawski find their counterpart in the momentary silences in Sibelius.

Although Strauss and Lutoslawski are current so far as to say Cage and I are current, although the currency is what I will call a Class AB2 overlap, which is to say, very little. Lutoslawski began to compose twelve-tone music in earnest by the late 1950's at which point he garnered attention for having done so. As Strauss composed well into his last days (he composed the Oboe Concerto in 1946), there is overlap. Cage was composing music when I began to in 1980. The variants are tenuous.

Twelve-tone music has little to offer the Double Concerto, except perhaps a congruence of pattern. The Double Concerto is far too playful to find its way on to the ambient-hardcore playlist of a college radio station (where Cage clones currently hold court). I may have more to do with Stravinsky, Cage and Lutoslawski than the composers have with each other. I make these observations while listening to Lutoslawski moreso than Cage or Stravinsky. I have little if any common ground with Strauss, although listening to his Concerto makes me wish that I did.

I suspect the true reason for this subterfuge recording is to have Strauss support the covert raison-d'etre which is to provide some valuable 1984 CD space for the Double Concerto (which is filled with plenty of empty space to allow the harp to be heard with fantastic dimension.)

To say that Lutoslawski's work compelled me to re-listen is no exaggeration. His Double Concerto makes an immediate impression of tension of the muscular type. Its opens in to a cataclysm of waves that envelops the listener with compression. The left and right halves of the orchestra undulate in a dissonant manner: I feel like the second violinists are pulling a saw through my head from left to right, while the viola players do the same thing, to varying degrees of phase, amplitude, and frequency, from right to left. It makes me want to squirm thrice, and I'm alone on the couch with Fancypants who knows a moment of bewilderment is best translated into a scream.