Last month ECM New Series put out their twentieth album featuring the conducting of Dennis Russell Davies. The ensemble is the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, for which was Chief Conductor from 1995 to 2005 and now serves as Conductor Laureate. The title of the CD is Musique funèbre, named for the first track, a composition by Witold Lutosławski to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Béla Bartók’s death on September 26, 1945, which was not given its first performance until 1958, after it had been completed to the composer’s satisfaction. This single-movement work is joined with two Bartók selections for string orchestra, Arthur Willner’s arrangement for string orchestra of the familiar Romanian Folk Dances, originally a set of six piano pieces (Sz. 56), and the Sz. 113 divertimento. The CD concludes with seven songs from the Sz. 103 set of 27 choruses in two and three parts, with the Hungarian Radio Children’s Choir joining the Stuttgart ensemble.
Lutosławski’s “Musique funèbre” (“Muzyka żałobna” in his native Polish) marked one of the composer’s earliest ventures into Arnold Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic approach to a grammar of harmony not dependent on tonality. However, it was also heavily influenced by Bartók’s compositional techniques, particularly his interest in imitative counterpoint and the rhetorical use of dissonant intervals such as minor seconds and tritones. While the overall architecture shows the influence of Bartók’s “Music for strings, percussion, and celesta” (Sz. 106), most of the techniques themselves can also be found in the Sz. 113 divertimento, making Davies’ decision to juxtapose these works a judicious one.
However, while he has effectively captured the somber qualities of Lutosławski’s rhetoric, he never really seems to rise to the far more cheerful side of all three Bartók selections. The fact is that, in the final movement of Sz. 113, Bartók is poking fun at his own technique, almost as if winking at the listener and saying, “You know enough of me by now to know that this is how I do things!” Davies comes closest to capturing the necessary lightness of touch in the choruses; but, while the orchestral performances certainly show all of the respect due to the score pages, they feel as if they are laboring under Lutosławski’s funerary connotations.
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