Witold Lutosławski

Born in Warsaw in 1913, Witold Lutosławski survived the traumas of 20th century Polish history to become one of the most admired and performed postwar composers. His long life saw him exiled during the First World War, giving underground concerts in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in the Second, and then treading a bold and often courageous line around the restrictions of postwar communist artistic policy in the Cold War. (At one point he made a living by writing pop songs under the pseudonym Derwid.) Incredibly, he found a way—writing music whose integrity defied official censure, and whose vitality and force of personality gave even his boldest experiments a human face. Bartók inspired his early, folk-influenced works like the Concerto for Orchestra (1954); but as official restrictions started to thaw, Lutosławski began to explore the possibilities of serialism (Musique funèbre) and even improvisation in his superb Cello Concerto (1970)—considered by many to be the greatest modern concerto for the instrument. But Lutosławski explained that he sought not anarchy, but freedom; and with his String Quartet (1964), his colourful, fiercely cogent Third and Fourth symphonies (1983 and 1994) and the glittering Piano Concerto from 1988 that he composed for Krystian Zimerman, he won international acclaim. He lived to see Poland’s liberation—and to be honoured by the new democratic government shortly before his death in 1994.