Farewell to Steven Stucky

The new music world is reeling after the news of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steven Stucky's untimely death on Sunday at the age of 66. One of his country's best-loved and most often performed contemporary composers, Stucky had fought a short battle with an aggressive form of brain cancer. Here is his obituary from the New York Times.

The Philharmonia Orchestra here in London fortuitously made a short film in which Stucky and his friend and fellow composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, the orchestra's chief conductor, discuss the music of Witold Lutosławski. As a tribute, here it is.

Viva Lutoslawski

The Witold Lutoslawski centenary festival, Woven Words, is about to get underway, opening on Wednesday evening at the Royal Festival Hall and named after the composer's 1965 work Paroles tissees. A look at the Philharmonia's designated website reveals that it's a fabulous resource. Hooray for the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, which is pumping support into this essential celebration of one of the century's towering musical figures.

The site includes a series of films exploring Lutoslawski's turbulent life history, tracing World War II and the Stalinist years in Poland with archive footage, musical extracts and fascinating insights from Steven Stucky (the series advisor) and other leading academics, as well as conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. And Mrs Spilman is interviewed, explaining that her husband Wladislaw (whose memoirs, The Pianist, I'm sure you know about) as head of music in Polish Radio, encouraged Lutoslawski to compose popular music under a pseudonym to keep body and soul together in the traumatised world of post-war and Stalinist era Warsaw.

During the Nazi occupation Lutoslawski and Panufnik worked together, playing piano duos in coffee houses in the Polish capital: normal musical life had been snuffed out and Chopin's music - as a symbol of Polish national pride - had been banned. (Music/politics/mix...). Essentially, the story of Lutoslawski is the story of Poland in the 20th century.

As the festival's slogan reminds us, "Music begins where words end." I've often started lectures, essays, commentary et al with that phrase and I knew I'd borrowed it from someone... How pleasing to discover that that someone was Lutoslawski. [UPDATE: oops - apparently Debussy got there first.] If you missed it the other day, here is my one and only interview with Lutoslawski, from a meeting in 1992, now available to read for the first time in all those years, courtesy of Sinfini.

There's a complete list of concerts in the Woven Words festival here.
And a set of essays and programme notes that should keep us all busy, learning and fascinated here.
Please click through and do some exploring.

Then please also explore the wonderful new Andrzej Panufnik website and start thinking about next year.

To kick us off, listen to the Lutoslawski Variations on a Theme of Paganini for two pianos, which he and Panufnik used to play together in those cafes. Tragically, most of their other manuscripts from the war years went up in flames. Here the performers are Martha Argerich and Gabriela Montero.